


Bonds of the Flesh

by HistorianVeronica



Series: Star Wars: Politics of Empire [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode V: Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Imperial Politics and Intrigue, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Non-Canon situations and backstories, Other, Partially AU, Post-Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back, Romantic Friendship, Sith tarot is a bit different, Tarot, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Vader's deliberate Dark gallantry, Vader's officer-killing spree, Vague allusions to Plagueis' abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 06:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16300028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HistorianVeronica/pseuds/HistorianVeronica
Summary: This story is mainly canon, but set in my long-extant Politics of Empire universe, which has mainly appeared in fanzines and in a few places on the internet over the years. This story begins prior to the attack on Hoth in TESB and concludes on the eve of ROTJ. Some situations and relationships are canon, but some alternate details crop up -- especially the concept that the Emperor Palpatine (*not* named Sheev in my universe) has aged and withered slowly from the passage of time and increased use of Dark Side energies/sorcery as many fans assumed prior to Lucas's transformation of Palpatine in ROTS. During this story, he looks as he does in ROTJ, but this has been a gradual development.When the story opens, Vader is frantic to find Luke, to form a trinity of Darkness, while Palpatine is considerably more ambivalent. The two Sith have what historians call a romantic friendship that is sometimes fraught with erotic tension but no sexual relationship... Commander Treylan Jenrelm, the dashing head of Imperial Military Intelligence (and Vader partisan), is stationed on Executor, and recently separated from his long-term companion, Civilian Intelligence Director Jon Kalendra. Intrigue and drama ensue.





	1. Things Fall Apart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Darth_Videtur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darth_Videtur/gifts), [Lightpoint](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightpoint/gifts), [WynCatastrophe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WynCatastrophe/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vader is frantically searching for Luke Skywalker, and officers are dropping like flies. The Emperor Palpatine is slowly dying, a casualty of old age and too much draining use of Dark Side sorcery. Both out of desire to find his son and in the hope that Luke could somehow help heal the Emperor, Vader is increasingly desperate to locate Luke. In the meantime budget constraints, infrastructure problems, and possible sabotage are plaguing Palpatine and his functionaries at Imperial Center, Coruscant.

 

 

"When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back." (Paulo Coelho)

 

**Chapter** **I. [Three months before the Battle of Hoth]:**

 

General Demossi, formerly of Chandrila, dropped to his knees on the deck plating, knocking his chair aside as he fell, fingers grasping desperately at his collar, ripping at the closures, tearing the fabric. His features were blue, his eyes too large in his face as he stared up at his seated comrades around the conference table with wordless, useless desperation. His fate was sealed – there was nothing any of them could have done, even had any been inclined to try.

 

Gagging, Demossi grabbed at the table edge with his free hand, clinging to it as if it could keep him from drowning in the permanent unconsciousness that rose up around him. He fought hard, refusing to give up to the very last second, struggling with every ounce of his formidable will to inhale a breath, even just a small one, past the invisible hand that constricted his airway. He only prolonged the inevitable.

           

Darth Vader stepped past him, already ignoring him before Demossi’s fingers went slack and slipped from the table’s surface. The Sith Lord strode in slow silence around the perimeter of the war room as the general slumped dead to the floor, and came to stand face to face with the next most powerful man in the room at far end of the table. “As I was saying,” Vader resumed quietly, with a deadly edge still tainting his tone, “I want no further delays in this plan. I have grown weary of the excuses and arguments. It is costing me valuable time.”

 

The officer he addressed was unintimidated – foolishly so – and merely met Vader’s down-turned gaze with a stubborn set of his jaw. “I think that General Demossi had valid concerns, Lord Vader,” Admiral Ozzel countered, clearly more irritated than frightened by his counterpart’s fate. “The resources you have requested are simply too expensive and too time-consuming to represent any kind of sound tactical—”

 

General Veers cleared his throat, and dared to interrupt Ozzel, despite the angry glare it earned him from the Fleet Admiral. “What I think General Demossi and Admiral Ozzel are trying to say, Lord Vader, if I may, is that this is an unprecedented departure from standard procedure, and it makes the bureaucratic types very nervous.” He gave Ozzel a lingering look, suggesting that he placed the Admiral in that distasteful category despite his military rank, then looked back up at the Dark Lord.

 

Vader was watching him quietly, waiting. Veers’ history with the Sith Lord went back considerably further – and with much more positive effect – than Ozzel’s, and that history meant that Vader afforded him a certain extra latitude that most officers did not share. He used it rarely and carefully. But two dead top-ranking officers in one day would be worse for morale than one, and so even though Veers bore Ozzel no particular affection, he felt obligated to try to keep the man from making an ass of himself yet again. The Admiral seemed to think he was immune to Vader’s temper. His ego refused to accept that he was actually quite a tempting target for the angry Sith.

 

Veers projected calm confidence into his voice as he continued smoothly, “I am quite certain that we can make it work, however. Give my engineers twenty-four Standard hours to run the numbers and factor sector ranges and search patterns, and I am positive we can find a way to accommodate your plan.”

 

Ozzel’s face was turning red, a sure sign that his temper was beginning to boil. Veers could not have cared less. Considering that the admiral had been firmly on Demossi’s side in the past several days, arguing hard against Vader’s new tactic for sniffing out the Alliance – and considering how short the Dark Lord’s temper had become in the past few months – as far as Veers was concerned, Ozzel already owed him his life. Add to that the admiral’s failure six months ago to capture a massing segment of the Rebel fleet outside the Corellian trading lanes, and his bungling four months before that of a raid on an Alliance outpost near Deestra Minor that cost the Fleet two Destroyers before the band of traitors was wiped out, and not even Ozzel’s wealthy family ties and long connections to the Throne and the recently dissolved Imperial Senate could save him if he kept it up. These days, in fact, Veers mused, having _any_ connection to those august institutions was more a liability than an asset where Vader was concerned.

 

The Dark Lord clasped his hands behind his back, a more relaxed pose he often assumed that indicated Veers had been successful in de-escalating the situation in the war room. “Twenty-four hours?” he repeated, his deep voice contemplative. He was silent for a moment, his gaze heavy upon Veers. The general nodded affirmation of his promise, and lifted his chin slightly, a sign of his assured conviction. 

 

Vader nodded, placated for the moment. “Very well. We shall re-convene this meeting at precisely this time tomorrow to hear your results, General. I will await your engineers’ assessment with anticipation.”

 

Behind Vader, and out of the Dark Lord’s view range, Ozzel sat back in his chair and rolled his eyes. Veers, still carefully keeping Vader’s attention focused upon him, ignored the admiral’s reaction and gave the Sith a deep nod of genuine respect, which was quickly mimicked by the junior officers present at the table. Vader’s gaze swept rapidly over each of them in turn before their armored commander turned on his heel and stalked out of the chamber, deliberately passing over Ozzel for any such final acknowledgement.

 

The admiral turned on Veers as soon as the door closed behind the exiting Sith Lord. “Have you completely _lost your mind?_ ” he growled. “You can’t make him promises like that! The Imperial military stands to lose billions of credits on this fiasco, and you just handed him a blank check with tomorrow’s date on it! What the hell are we going to tell High Command? What the hell are you going to tell _him_ tomorrow, for that matter,” Ozzel said, gesturing sharply at the closed door, “when your engineers gag on their own tongues today at the sight of his proposal and his time-frame?”

 

Unruffled at the outburst, Veers leaned back in his own chair and let out a long, slow breath, the only sign he gave of the stress the last few minutes had cost him. “My engineers are my concern, Admiral. And so is the time-frame. As for the money, Research and Development can easily absorb the cost of this endeavor, regardless of the outcome. If Lord Vader’s proposal were to go to the finance committees on Coruscant, it would only get tied up even longer in debate, and more heads would roll here in the meantime.”

 

Veers gave Ozzel a pointed look. “Yours, in particular, is in imminent danger, I think, if you don’t adopt a more accommodating position on the whole matter and stop trying to obstruct Vader at every turn. It’s not like you have come up with any better plans for routing out the Alliance’s new base of operations in the past few months.” It was the most blunt Veers had ever been with Ozzel, especially in front of other officers, and several sets of eyes widened around the table even as the admiral’s narrowed. Veers gestured a finger idly toward the empty place at the end of the table opposite Ozzel’s, where both the chair and Demossi had disappeared to the floor, out of the admiral’s direct range of sight. Veers still had a clear view of Demossi’s face, and he wished he didn’t.

 

“Vader can only be pushed so far, and only so often,” Veers warned Ozzel amiably, and then glanced around the room to extend his warning to all the officers present. “I, for one, do not intend to be the next officer to disappoint him.”

 

With that, Veers pushed himself up out of his chair, rising to stand there a moment, both hands splayed on the table before him, his keen gaze returning to the admiral’s reddened face. “It’s a sound plan,” he said easily, and then his voice hardened slightly. “Get behind it. Before he decides you are an obstruction like Demossi and decides to remove you from his path.”

 

Ozzel’s chest puffed in outrage, and his cheeks flushed even darker crimson as he glared at Veers, but the general wasn’t interested in anything else Ozzel might have to say. He had less than twenty-four hours now to make good on his promise, and his engineers were going to need every precious minute of that time. Ozzel was no longer his problem. He stepped out from his seat, neatly stepping over Demossi’s splayed arm as he did so, and headed for the door. One of the junior officers would deal with the body. That was not Veers’ problem, either.

 

 

*

**[Two months before the Battle of Hoth]:**

 

When the power to Imperial City’s central governmental sector suddenly died for the second time that month, the Emperor Palpatine and several of his closest advisers were in a late afternoon budgetary conference. The sunlight pouring in through the panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows of Palpatine’s office more than compensated for the lamps that had extinguished themselves, but the lack of continued air coolant would soon become problematic.

 

Palpatine’s long-time personal secretary, Petra Filene, unflappable as always, quickly slipped out to contact maintenance personnel and, no doubt, to order colder refreshments to replace the hot kafin most of the men sipped around the long polished table. At the table’s head, Palpatine seemed equally serene, while inwardly dreading how long this particular blackout – once unthinkable – would endure.

 

“Let us take a short break until we have a report,” the ruler announced. “Ten minutes.”

 

Most of the men nearest to him were the soonest to bow gracefully and depart, he noticed: the usual pattern asserting itself. A few seats down, Military Intelligence Commander Treylan Jenrelm looked up from sending a message from his portable comm unit. Unlike most of the officials here, he almost never showed fear even in Palpatine’s physical and psychic proximity. Jenrelm was equally confident now, meeting the ruler’s gaze with the sort of dazzling smile that had undoubtedly helped him acquire the rumored hundreds of lovers he’d had since adolescence.

 

“My mother always says that bad luck runs in threes.” Jenrelm said conversationally, with a near-audacity that frequently reminded Palpatine of the officer’s immediate military superior, Darth Vader. It was hardly surprising that Jenrelm and the Dark Lord had forged something of a solid friendship over the last decade – that is, if Vader precisely could be said to have friends in the first place…

 

Some Sith legends held that misfortune manifested itself across seven seemingly unconnected events. Such inauspicious developments were properly to be regarded as messages from the Force: lessons for Darkness’s adherents to decipher, and hence opportunities to alter their behavior or attitudes accordingly, lest even worse fates befall them. But considering that the recent power grid failures and malfunctions of the capital planet’s ancient weather control systems had been predicted more than ninety years ago, and their replacements repeatedly deferred since that time, Palpatine tended to blame a century’s worth of Coruscanti and galactic politicians for this particular misfortune. No need to bring the Force into it at all.

 

Not that that was any great comfort to him now. Given that he had served as one of those senators, chancellors, and presidents, and now ruled as Emperor, the problem was his to resolve. Never mind that no pre-allocated funds presently existed, or that his first action after the Senate’s dissolution had been to increase income, inheritance, and estate taxes across the Empire. Even their expanded budget already ran into the red, as the Rebellion increasingly encroached into Imperial space and military expenditures grew exponentially to meet the rising threat…

 

“So what is the third thing?” Civilian Intelligence Director Jon Kalendra murmured, sitting at Palpatine’s right hand and looking across the table at Jenrelm. “You think the power will fail a third time this summer? The engineers reassured us this would not happen again.”

 

“It doesn’t have to be that,” Jenrelm said, trying to lighten the pessimistic mood. “Perhaps when I leave this room, I’ll stumble and break a toe.”

 

“Parts of WeatherNet are not simply faltering, but failing,” the Emperor confirmed their suspicions grimly, not inclined to enable the MI commander’s attempt at levity. “A longer summer for most of the planet is inevitable at this point, with higher temperatures than in previous years.”

 

“If WeatherNet gives out completely,” Filene pointed out as he slid back into his chair, “the summers will be the most extreme we’ve had in centuries – and the power grids will falter even more frequently.”

 

“WeatherNet is the absolute priority. But the grid – costly as it is – is vastly less expensive to repair, or even to expand. I have outlined everything, including cost projections, in a report to the Interior Minister, Lord Vader. I had hoped he would make an appearance today, for there is much to discuss.” Palpatine inwardly cringed at the querulous note in his aged voice and deliberately smoothed it out mid-sentence.

 

“Lord Vader asked me to serve as his proxy for this meeting,” Jenrelm reminded the group, referring to a practice Vader frequently resorted to since Palpatine had added the Interior Minister’s office to the Dark Lord’s growing portfolio of titles, duties, and positions. The Emperor had selected Vader as a temporary measure only, when the previous minister, Emil Atanysov, had suddenly died in office a few years ago. Yet considering Vader’s strong opinions – all too frequently expressed these days – about nearly every aspect of ruling this galaxy, Palpatine had not assertively searched for a permanent replacement.

 

“I will send this meeting’s minutes to his lordship immediately,” the MI commander assured Palpatine and the other high-ranking officials still at the table. “I’ll make certain he knows everything we’ve discussed today.”

 

“Of course you will,” the monarch replied. Obsessed with finding the Rebels who had destroyed the Death Star battle station – but particularly Luke Skywalker, the son whom they had only recently learned even existed, who had fired that fatal shot – Vader had not been to Coruscant in months. Yet the Dark Lord’s agents, proxies, and informants, scattered liberally throughout the military and civilian hierarchies and even the Palace staff – and only some of whom were known to Palpatine – made sure that Vader kept abreast of nearly everything that transpired. Theoretically, of course, the Emperor should expect no less from his warlord and heir apparent. The emotional reality of their situation, of course, was infinitely more complex. Some days, such as this one, when so many things seemed to be moving out of his control, Palpatine found the entire state of affairs deeply unsettling.

 

Planetary climatic engineers had mitigated the human toll of the summer’s first blackout to the best of their considerable abilities, eventually producing brief rolling blackouts and brownouts that minimized the lives lost during the four days’ duration of the crisis. Once WeatherNet slowly recalibrated itself – helped along with manual overrides and reprogramming that had for centuries never been necessary and in fact even now seemed risky – and began directing cooler air from Coruscant’s slowly melting poles to the region of the planet most tilted toward the sun, things had begun to improve.

 

The relatively sharp angle of Coruscant’s axis had originally caused dramatic seasonal disparities, inspiring visionary engineers centuries ago to design WeatherNet first for the planet’s central government sector, then for the entire Capital, and eventually for other Core worlds. The result was many generations of regulated and usually clement weather: Coruscant’s storms were rare, moderate and nocturnal. The equatorial regions experienced a short gentle rainfall nearly each day as on many other planets – but only in the evenings, once standard business hours were done. Winters across the planet had been typically mild, even the northernmost climes gifted with occasional, picturesque, and entirely manageable amounts of snow.

 

But this year, Force only knew what would happen. Already WeatherNet’s engineers and meteorologists were predicting their inability to prevent all late summer thunderstorms and winter blizzards. Those events, however, could be far better managed than the colossal heat waves and power outages that had combined to make this summer the most challenging in Palpatine’s years on the Throne.

 

“Did Vader send you here with new recommendations?” the ruler asked with deceptive mildness. He had already received an entire list of proposals and near-demands from his Dark Lord after the first such crisis – most of them echoing Vader’s years-old refrain that the Core’s wealthiest families and corporations could be made to contribute larger percentages than even Palpatine’s newest tax codes required.

 

“No, Majesty. He said there was no need for repetition.”

 

Palpatine merely nodded. Thank the Force for small mercies. Yet beneath his relief lay renewed irritation; were the warlord less preoccupied with his obsessive search for his ill-begotten brat, Vader would no doubt be here in person with an extensive list of proposals and all sorts of Persuasion in his bass voice. While in some ways that was hardly an event to be desired, the fact was that Palpatine would have almost welcomed the opportunity to let his student take over certain matters here, at least for the few days’ duration of the Dark Lord’s visit.

 

Filene’s assistants appeared with iced drinks just as Palpatine felt the first drop of perspiration trickle down his backbone. He rued needing to be grateful for such a small, ignominious animal thing. But at the height of the last heat wave and power outage, the ruler had not perspired at all, while (at least to judge from the smell before the air-ventilators had finally come back on) apparently every other human in the palace had done so quite freely. Like so many other elderly – and he still cringed at that word – humans on Coruscant, the Emperor’s biological temperature-regulating mechanisms had mostly ceased to function.

 

 

*

War, rumors of war, blackouts and brownouts and summer heat and lightning… Imperial Center’s sense of stunned relief after power was fully restored and winds and rains confined to nocturnal hours again (in one of WeatherNet’s erratic but unpredictable periods of full functionality) had given way a few days later to displays of public anxiety and irrationality – as if even the masses of non-Sensitive bureaucrats and office personnel and Palace employees knew that momentous and possibly fateful changes awaited just over the horizon.

  
Denizens of Jenrelm’s favorite restaurants, nightclubs, and kafin-shops muttered to themselves more than usual. People shouted in public venues, children misbehaving and couples fighting bitterly over brunch or tea or late-night cocktails. It was no better, really, than the constant low-level dread buzzing through _Executor_ ’s officers and crew these days…

 

And the atmosphere was only slightly better in the Palace itself.  Seeming to temporarily forget or at least to ignore their estrangement, Jon sought him out one quiet evening. “My gods, I think everyone is going mad,” Kalendra sighed, dropping wearily into a nearby armchair.

  
More formal than he used to be with the CI director, Treylan put out his cigarette and turned down the instrumental music playing in the background. “What now?” He struggled to focus, not to push for more than Jon was willing to give – not to read too much into his ex-lover’s need for company and friendship this evening.

 

“Two of my guards were actually arguing today in the corridors – a loud verbal exchange over gods know what – in the public areas on the first floor. Even some of the tourists overheard them.”

 

Jenrelm struggled to imagine it – the faceless, stoic, and usually nearly silent red-garbed sentries engaged in such unseemly displays. “I am glad His Majesty or Lord Vader did not witness it,” he remarked.

 

“Can you imagine?” Jon sighed tiredly and ran long fingers through his brown hair, mussing it. Trey resisted the urge to reach over and smooth it down again, knowing such intimate physical contact was no longer welcome.

 

“Would there really be harm in ending those public tours just for now – a short hiatus until the worst of the summer has passed? The last thing you need here – all of you – is a bunch of gawking, nervous beings trapped in an elevator, or sweating in the art galleries when the power goes out again.”

 

“I’ll speak to Filene about it,” Kalendra agreed, rubbing a hand across his face as if trying to massage himself into a better attitude. “Last week Security broke up a row among several of the kitchen staff.”

 

Trey raised an eyebrow. “What the hells?”

 

“Some conflict about how to prepare rare mushrooms. Don’t ask me how, but it escalated into accusations of culinary incompetence and fights about the complementary qualities of herbs across the galaxy.”

 

Jon chuckled rather mirthlessly at the younger man’s incredulous expression. “I know,” he said. “One assistant chef stormed out. Another hinted that he was not about to stick around should the mushrooms in question sicken the Emperor and trigger a kitchen staff purge. He left without giving notice.”

 

“Do you think he meant a mass layoff – or something more dire?”

 

“Either is possible, Trey. Isn’t it, especially these days?”

 

“And the controversial fungi in question?” Jenrelm didn’t want to think about what might happen to relatively innocent culinary and service personnel should either or both Sith retaliate for such a calamity.

 

“They seemed perfectly fine. I had some the next day in an omelet.”

 

“Brave man.”  


“Not really.” Jon shrugged. “Everyone is being perfectly melodramatic these days.”

 

“Did you remind them,” Trey asked, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, “that Palpatine is unlikely to eat much of anything they prepare in the first place?”

 

Jon’s dark humor instantly fled his eyes, and now his gaze shone with unadulterated concern. Trey wished he hadn’t said anything, but he’d been so eager to resume something resembling their old, easy banter…

 

“That’s part of the problem,” Kalendra replied. “They know something’s wrong. They aren’t used to having meals go uneaten, meetings canceled at the last moment, or plates sent back untouched. They are reading dire meanings into everything.”

 

Jenrelm only nodded. No one knew what to do about Palpatine’s behavior or how aged and ill the monarch frequently seemed since the destruction of Alderaan and the Death Star. “How much does Vader know, do you think?” he asked gently, for this was something of a sensitive topic.

 

Jon gave an explosive sigh. “Really? I have no idea. I have hinted to Filene once or twice that someone needs to say _something_. He actually jumped down my throat.”

 

“Sweet, calm Petra Filene? Well, that’s hardly reassuring.”

 

“It is not. Be glad you weren’t here when the first blackout hit weeks ago. The Palace generators dutifully worked for two days, but they’re at least three hundred years old.” No galactic government in these past few centuries had anticipated using them – much less needing to replace or update them. After two days their stored solar power was depleted. “By the time their batteries were drained, the grid was only partially restored, and we were two more days with extremely intermittent power and air conditioning.”

 

Treylan nodded. “Vader disappeared into his quarters as soon as he learned the generators stopped working. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him, but I imagine he was in constant contact with the Emperor?”

 

“As far as I know.” Jon shrugged. “And thank the gods, because I never want to ask His Majesty whether he has ‘circulatory or other medical problems that typically affect elderly and chronically ill humanoids,’ or to be responsible for advising him to ‘drink plenty of cool fluids and avoid strenuous activity.’”

 

Jenrelm smiled without any real humor behind it. “I see you’ve memorized the public service announcements. Seriously, though…based on what I saw today, isn’t nearly everything ‘strenuous’ for him now?”

 

“I never thought I’d say this, but things were actually better when Tarkin was here.”

 

Jenrelm stiffened a bit at this mention of the Dark Lord’s chief rival. “I’m not sure about that. It’s been lovely having fewer political fires to put out – and Tarkin’s allies are distinctly…subdued these days.”

 

“What remains of them, yes,” Kalendra agreed. Then his expression hardened. “But now Palpatine spends long hours alone, nearly every evening, after official functions or meetings have ended for the day. Some weekends he sends Filene home, attends no public performances, has no guests in the Palace, and no one sees him until the work week begins.”

 

“That must be stressful for you,” Trey acknowledged. How often did Jon wonder whether the Emperor were ill… or worse?  “And he hardly seems better rested, for all his solitude and reduced schedule.”

 

“Exactly. And no one should be so much alone, I think.”

 

Trey could not prevent a short, bitter laugh. “Seriously? We’re all alone now. You, me. Vader. Palpatine.”

 

It was a mistake. He knew it as soon as he spoke, and Jon confirmed it by leaping to his booted feet. “Yes, well. Some things cannot be helped, I imagine.”

 

“I suppose not.” Trey stood as well. “Don’t go,” he urged softly. “We can have a drink, or walk in the gardens. How long has it been since you’ve had any fresh air? Hells, we could even go out, and get out of these walls for awhile…”

 

But the brief camaraderie had passed. “I’m sorry, Trey. You’ll have to find your companionship elsewhere this evening. But, then, you’re very good at that, aren’t you?”

  
“Wait!” The MI officer racked his brains for something to say that would repair everything: some version of atonement or apology he’d not already tried. Lamely, what came out was, “Do you want me to speak to Vader about how things are here?”

 

“Not if Filene is so insistent, no. He is closer to the Emperor than anyone these days, and I have to trust his judgment in this matter.”

 

“Why, Jon? Lord Vader needs to know. He deserves to know. What if only Palpatine’s considerable pride is keeping Vader from his confidence? Maybe His Majesty needs one of us to help him in this respect, because he cannot bring himself to admit such—“

 

“Treylan. Do you seriously, truly, think that after so many years with the Emperor, Vader does not have some kind of a damned good idea?”

 

“He has not said anything to me about it,” was all Trey could claim to defend his position.

 

“Why in all the earths would he?”

 

“Let me know if you change your mind.”

  
“It’s late. I’m going to bed. _Alone._ ”

 

Now that they had returned to both of their irresolvable, long-standing quarrels, Kalendra’s back was stiffly formal as he departed Trey’s quarters. Jenrelm was only thankful that the automated sliding mechanism prevented his former companion from slamming the door on the way out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. WeatherNet is canon; what I have done with it is entirely my own devising.  
> 2\. There are no sex scenes in this story, although sexual relations are discussed and contemplated.  
> 3\. Everyone in the Palace is increasingly tense as the Emperor's decline becomes increasingly obvious -- and sometimes his emotions are affecting Palace personnel on a psychic and/or emotional level, usually without beings' knowledge.


	2. A Grim Visit Home

**Chapter** **2\. [Two weeks after the Battle of Hoth; a few months before Bespin]:**

 

“What a pleasant surprise, Lord Vader.” Palpatine’s tone, however seemingly gracious, belied his words with underlying hints of disapproval of his Dark Lord’s sudden, unannounced appearance at his suite. “It is late. The household is abed and cannot properly receive you. You said you would be here tomorrow morning.”

 

 _The household cannot properly receive you…_ When had the man cared about that? _Rather, I am abed, and not at my best…. _ Usually, as the Dark Lord had begun to consciously notice, Palpatine was elaborately dressed for Vader’s appearances regardless of the hour. No matter their two decades together, the monarch liked to receive him formally even in private, sitting upright with elegant dignity on thronelike unyielding chairs, or posture-perfect on his parlor’s antique couch.

 

Vader stifled his sardonic impulses, and kept his tone soft and courteous: “It _is_ morning, barely. We made extraordinarily good time.”

 

 _I pushed the engines and crew as fast as they could go; I wanted to take you by surprise and find out what’s really going on here…_ Deliberately inscrutable, Vader let Palpatine wonder whatever he wished, and quickly assessed the scene.

 

Palpatine half sat and half reclined against plush pillows arranged behind him on the enormous carved-wood bed. He was dressed in a simple black sleeping tunic and trousers – unlike the elaborate layers of shimmersilk, brocade, soft wools, and fine linen he usually wore in Vader’s presence. Now he resembled far more the ascetic Sith master and less the Naboo aristocrat or Coruscanti nobleman, with not a trace of embroidery, fur, lace, or jewelry about him. An old leather-bound realbook lay on the bed, its spine revealing only a faded hint of spidery Sith script – some esoteric volume on sorcery, no doubt.

 

A half-consumed glass of burgundy wine graced the bedside table. Several lamps scattered around the spacious chamber burned a low amber glow. Obviously the Emperor was in the process of retiring for the night, but had not yet settled into sleep.  A small portable muscle-stim unit was attached to Palpatine’s left leg, which had been seriously injured several years ago when he and Vader nearly died on a remote planet: the damage done to the ruler’s tendons and knee were enough to require him to begin using a cane these last few years. Vader sensed how the older man loathed this dependency, although the two had not discussed the matter. Neither had the stoic Palpatine, usually quick to offer assurances of his own well-being, mentioned whether he had experienced any improvement… and therefore Vader knew otherwise.

 

The Emperor had visibly aged since the Dark Lord had seen him last, about three months ago, his body clearly declining at an ever faster rate. How much longer, Vader wondered, would Palpatine refuse to acknowledge this in their rare times together? Yet he also understood why any proud Sith would rue needing to confess such a thing to his pupil-successor; in nearly all Dark Side partnerships, it would be both an admission of mortality and invitation to a sudden death sentence.

 

“Apparently so,” the older man replied with a false curve of his thin lips. New, deeper lines emerged like brackets from nose to chin. “You rarely arrive here _sooner_ than you anticipate.” Palpatine looked pale and gaunt and tired, but the edge in his words was a potent reprimand for the many months Vader usually spent with the Fleet, avoiding visits to Coruscant whenever transmissions sufficed. Since Alderaan, it was much safer this way – far easier to avoid angry and potentially deadly interaction – but that truth hardly made the situation less poignant.

 

“Surprise is a useful battle tactic,” Vader rumbled mildly, his voice as non-threatening as he and the damned vocoder could make it. “It helps me more accurately gauge the situation at hand.”

 

“Perhaps. But we are hardly at war with one another.” Even as Palpatine said the words, however, a true wry smile quirked the corner of his mouth. Both men knew that things stood otherwise – that a sort of non-violent but deadly earnest contest had raged between them for years. Their bodies and psyches had been – so far – mostly safe from one another. But their proxies and agents, their emotions and ambitions and hopes, were different sorts of casualties in this decade-long cold war. 

 

And Vader was abruptly weary of it.

 

“I do miss you, Master. Upon occasion.” The lateness of the hour and the moonlight seeping through the garden windows made him rather bold.

 

Palpatine gave a low appreciative laugh.  “My lord is unusually impulsive tonight,” he observed, a myriad of conflicting emotions flashing in his golden eyes. None of them lingered long enough for Vader to grasp firm hold of, but the Dark Lord instinctively knew that, among other things, Palpatine hated how the younger man towered over him.

 

As if having that exact thought, the Emperor switched off the electronic muscular stimulator. “I will stretch my legs a bit then, and alert the staff that you are in residence sooner than anticipated.  If I had known you were arriving this evening,” he reprimanded gently, “I would have ordered a special dinner for us and had it brought here.” He began removing the unit’s leads from his knee and thigh in obvious preparation to rise.

 

“No need.” Vader waved a gauntleted hand, gesturing for his master to remain still. “I will ask the kitchens to prepare something suitable,” His tone reflected a courtly formality, automatically falling into the polite tension that nearly always strained their partnership these days.

 

Then with a muttered obscenity, he deliberately broke the mood, abruptly sitting on the bed’s edge, and finished pulling the device from Palpatine’s slender leg. “Does this even help you?” he demanded imperiously, seeing in his mind’s eye the ruler’s collapse beneath Vader’s massive armored weight in that damned cave on Etren IV. Already gravely wounded in their crash-landing on that forsaken planet, Palpatine had barely noticed the comparatively minor trauma he’d sustained in that fall. Ironically, his life-threatening injuries had healed within several weeks of their rescue, while the relatively less serious damage to his leg and back lingered as seemingly permanent mementos of that ill-fated adventure.

 

Palpatine raised an eyebrow and replied with a toneless calm: “On seemingly random evenings. Often enough to make the effort worthwhile. Sometimes heat is better.”

 

“Medications?” the younger man rumbled, still challenging Palpatine’s icy amber gaze.

 

“Generally pointless.”

 

“Etren was almost six years ago,” Vader stated bluntly, revealing nothing of his difficulty in nursing his grudges that long – or how those resentments had paled next to his horror at Alderaan’s fate. He held his tongue about the Death Star and the planet’s destruction, but the specters of those events abruptly hovered in the air between them. So he forged ahead, and his relentlessness was somehow both men’s just deserts: “Your injuries seemed to improve for awhile. But now…?” He trod close to, but did not trespass upon, the tacitly forbidden topic of Palpatine’s accelerating age.

 

Even so, the older man stiffened at his temerity. For a long moment Vader thought he would refuse to answer. When Palpatine finally replied, Vader almost wished he hadn’t pushed so hard for the truth. “One more way, my friend,” Palpatine said with a brittle, aristocratic tone, “in which many things have become more difficult these last several years.”

The Emperor’s eyes fiercely gleamed with a sort of jaded defiance, as well as other emotions Vader did not quite have the fortitude or impertinence to explore. It was not safe to pursue the topic further, just as he could not mention Alderaan, or even Orestum. Neither did he dare discuss Palpatine’s failing body or their disintegrating dyad. And he did not possess the energy tonight to address the Alliance victories nibbling away at the edges of the Empire despite Vader and the Fleet’s efforts – strategies and maneuvers conducted in the absence of the Death Star which might have reversed the tide, and yet which had sent dozens of systems flocking to the Rebellion in predictable reaction to Alderaan’s destruction…

 

Nor would he mention the status of the second such battle station, its construction authorized even before the first was finished, and which currently proceeded with an overhauled design and delayed production schedule… Vader strongly suspected Palpatine intended to place the second Death Star under the Dark Lord’s final authority – which, had he done that with the first such project, would have put the two Sith in a very different relationship today – and virtually guaranteed Alderaan’s continued existence. Certainly that topic was unsafe for conversation, until and unless Palpatine himself broached it.

 

And above all, Vader certainly dared not discuss what most needed acknowledged: his unwavering sense that everything and everyone seemed poised suddenly at the edge of the abyss…

 

Instead he lowered his gaze and backed away from the frigid heat of their fraught psychic connection. Nodding at the Emperor’s confirmations of the bitter knowledge Vader had already intuitively possessed, the warlord tossed the generally useless contraption to the floor. Quirking his eyebrows in slight surprise at the younger man’s continued presumption, Palpatine got his elbows under him and moved to sit up fully.  But in a heady marriage of fond concern and bitter resentment, Vader gently, effortlessly, pushed him back against the cushions, deliberately disregarding the monarch’s usual dislike of physical contact.

 

Turbulent and potentially dangerous silence churned between them. Requesting no permission for the additional momentous liberties he was taking, Vader stripped off his gauntlets and extended sensory-enhanced cybernetic fingers to explore the permanently traumatized sinews of the man’s left leg. Palpatine’s gaze was heavy upon him, and the ruler’s Force-scrutiny was electricity passing over and through the armored warrior, prickling across Vader’s massive frame. Darkness sank anticipated tendrils into Vader’s careful surface mood, vainly attempting to fasten to his most dearly shielded motives and thoughts. Exhilaration and suspense thrilled the younger man’s blood.

 

“I stopped in my quarters only long enough to leave my lightsaber,” the Dark Lord stated in quiet reassurance: a deliberate calm counterpoint to the nearly feral energies reverberating between the Sith. He focused through the older man’s formidable psychic evaluation to identify and massage the obstinately knotted muscles in Palpatine’s calf. The neural networks meshed into state-of-the-art synthflesh assisted his accuracy far more than mere organic fingertips ever could – one of the few times Vader was consciously grateful for this artificial augmentation of his preternatural abilities. “Then I came directly here. I did not even retrieve my messages first.  Force help me, I think I am nostalgic this evening.”

 

“Ah.” Finally the sovereign began to relax very slightly under his apprentice’s deft ministrations. The prickling Force-examination faded, although those falcon’s eyes retained a laser-like focus on Vader’s black visor. “You are _exceedingly_ impulsive tonight.”

 

Palpatine lay still for a moment, then asked languidly, “Have you been drinking?”  
  
This elicited a real, rare laugh from the younger man. “Would it go better for me if I were?” 

 

“No. Fortunately for you and your trademark audacity, I finished off a bottle of wine shortly before you arrived.”  Waving a thin, etiolated hand, Palpatine activated the environmental controls that would soon purify the air and allow the Dark Lord to remove his mask and helmet. Vader was relieved; if the man were dangerously angry at his armored champion’s impudence, such an invitation to linger in comfort would not have been forthcoming.

 

“I am sorry I missed cocktail hour.” He frowned beneath his intimidating facial gear, but this was another topic he dared not broach – Palpatine’s recent dramatically increased alcohol consumption. The Dark Lord had always thought it a bit banal to have informants placed in the Palace kitchens, larders and cellars, but of late those contacts had become most illuminating…

 

“Add another carafe when you have the food sent up. If ever we settle into a sane routine, if and when you are permanently in residence, we might have dinner and drinks at predictable, proper times, like civilized beings…” Palpatine’s tone was characteristically wry, but some poignant edge tinged the ruler’s aura with indigo-violet, and hitched Vader’s mechanized breathing for a moment all the same.

 

Then the younger man’s regulated heart somehow skipped a beat when his master added softly, “When there are three of us to rule this galaxy, perhaps life will finally become less chaotic.”

 

Offhanded as the comment seemed, it was the first time in months that the Emperor had acknowledged the possibility of Luke’s joining them – and only the second time he’d done so with anything more than impersonal Dark utility. As much as anything, those moments seemed an admission of Palpatine’s personal needs, and a recognition that, with the growing Rebellion and Palpatine’s inexorable decline, the Sith lords needed the young Jedi to help them salvage everything they had built over the last two decades.

 

_“When Skywalker stays with you for training,” Vader had offered not that long ago, his quiet desperation hidden behind adamantine psychic barriers, “I will be better able to end the Rebellion. Without their Jedi figurehead they are lost.”_

_In a rare implied acknowledgment of…isolation? Resignation? Physical debility…? Palpatine had answered, “I will welcome his company when I cannot have yours. I have missed having a pupil. When he is reliably able to help manage the Fleet, I can have you here, too, more frequently.”_

_The Emperor had turned from Vader to stare out the doors into the gardens. “You and I may attend public functions together again. The Opera and Orchestra have begun to read all sorts of dire, nonexistent political meaning into my recent absences… We might play chess for the first time in years.”_

_For more than three decades Palpatine had proudly occupied the Supreme Chancellor’s box, and later the Royal Imperial box, at all major Coruscanti artistic premieres. Vader could not imagine the ruler’s top staff – Kalendra, Filene, and others, perhaps –  using it while Palpatine remained at home. But Jenrelm had already described as much to the Dark Lord…_

_The last time the Sith had attended a performance together, nearly three years ago, Vader had needed to help a silently mortified Emperor to his feet after more than two hours in the suddenly too-plush, too-deep, yet unchanged chair… At the time the Dark Lord had attributed the trouble to Palpatine’s immense pride – he’d defiantly, unwisely left the hated walking stick at home that evening – and to extraordinary stiffness and pain, perhaps, from the unseasonably bitter-cold winds and brewing snowstorm outdoors._

_Indeed, the warlord had nearly forgotten the incident. But now, while monitoring Palpatine’s deceptively serene outward affect, Vader already contemplated alternate ways for the older man to enter and exit the box without being seen.  He was mentally rearranging his schedule in order to accompany Palpatine to events – and to be the only being who might touch him, assist him, and shield him physically from prying eyes and the indignity of public speculation…_

_But Vader had remained silent, for Palpatine was half thinking aloud – often a pedagogical exercise – and his long-time pupil had better pay close attention.  Then even more remarkably, his master quietly mused after a long pause, “Do you think he has healing Talent? We would never seek such assistance from other Jedi. But in this personal case, such skills might be singularly advantageous, on your ships, helping you and your men in battle…” _

_The senior Sith uncharacteristically plucked at a loose thread on his brocaded sleeve. Vader scrutinized the monarch’s slender back –  indefinably fragile, yet still indomitably straight and proud --  as Palpatine finally glanced over his shoulder and concluded in a nearly inaudible, almost vulnerable tone: “And, perhaps, he might be of use even here…”_

_The sovereign’s wistful self-consciousness – whether genuine or a bravura performance for Vader’s consumption – had stunned Vader into continued silence and a brief hope that things might turn out all right after all.  Perhaps Palpatine would not permit his agents, if they found Luke before Vader managed it, to simply kill Anakin Skywalker’s son_ …

 

Now, two seasons later, Vader had to repress a shiver at the fraught memories.

 

Assessing the not-unrelated, ambivalent emotions that seeped from the edges of Palpatine’s shields, the armored warrior did not falter in his attentions. Vader slid powerful fingers to gently but ruthlessly loosen the tautness behind Palpatine’s knee. Almost against his master’s will, Palpatine’s shock at their rare physical contact and his suspicions of Vader’s agenda slowly ebbed, as the Dark Lord had hoped, beneath his apprentice’s massage and his deliberate projection of careful reverence. _Call off your hounds_ , he wanted to urge, plea, demand.

 

_Do not risk your men harming this boy we both need. Let me be the one to find him – to spare his life. To bring him here… To make him love us.  _

_Let me save all three of us…_

_Promise me. You know I’ve never asked for such assurances before…_

 

But the delicate balance of their occasional companionship was a shockingly fragile thing, so easily upset…  Vader knew that Palpatine believed Luke had already been half-trained as their assassin, and that in less sentimental moments the ruler was quite capable of pondering and even plotting the young Jedi’s cruel demise.  So the Dark Lord decided to save the request for later – perhaps after dinner, or during a long-deferred chess match for which his master apparently felt such nostalgia, or in the wee hours of the morning when Palpatine was mellowest with wine and camaraderie and fatigue, and before Vader returned to his own quarters for some sleep.

 

The ruler sighed wearily and closed his eyes, finally deciding to permit the intense emotional and physical demands of the moment. The apprehension and distrust Vader had sensed since his unexpected arrival, writhing like serpents beneath Palpatine’s sternum, had finally calmed and faded. Vader’s own frame started to relax despite his many reasons for tension as he focused on the rhythm of his ministrations and the slowly growing restfulness of the room.

 

Still, while he traced the ridges of surgically mended ligaments and tendons, assessing (lamenting, savoring) the damage that further compromised Palpatine’s weakening body, Vader felt his customary protectiveness arise almost against his will – and cold fury at the saboteur who had crash-landed them on Etren IV. Anger at their injuries and weeks of near-starvation.  Rage at how, in their isolation, he and Palpatine had grown closer than they’d been in many years of personal and political disagreements, only to rue things said and done in that intimacy and grow more estranged upon their return. Palpatine had been tangibly distant for nearly a year afterward, and Vader’s trips to Coruscant had dwindled even further in their number and duration since that time.

 

Impotent, wordless regret suffused the Dark Lord. Indeed, he could only hope that Palpatine felt something similar. Given the elder Sith’s cautiously optimistic comments about Luke, his equivocal emotional state, and his continued tolerance of Vader’s attentions, there might be no better time to raise the particular fraught topic the warlord had in fact come here to confront.

 

“Master,” the younger man said, keeping his deep voice low, “I know you wish to discuss complaints you have doubtlessly received from the High Command.”

 

“Of course. That is really why I called you home.” Golden orbs opened to gaze into black eyeplates. Even in Palpatine’s pain and fatigue, those eyes still had the power to make some part of Vader’s soul tremble. “So many valuable officers, in just twelve weeks. Agurien, Liete. Demossi. Some of the best we had.”

 

“They did well in the academies; they seemed competent in basic Fleet and ground situations. But every one of those men failed me in the crisis of battle, when subtlety and obedience were most necessary.”

 

 _Obedience and subtlety, hmm? Such as the tactful deference and unquestioning submission I have so invariably received these many years from you, my lord...? _ The warlord could almost hear Palpatine’s likely tacit mockery. On less perilous occasions and in more trusting times, the Emperor would have voiced it. It was yet another way in which prowess and mastery lately ebbed and flowed and pulsed ambiguously between them, Darkness itself favoring first one Sith and then the other in irregular, uneven, and unpredictable fluctuations of power and authority.

 

 _Was this what it was like with you, my hated-beloved master, when you finally resolved to kill your own? Did the Force goad you, restrain you, hold you back one moment while urging you to seize everything the next?_ Even as Vader added this to the many questions he dared not ask this night, he craved Palpatine’s insight and instruction, as ironic as that seemed. The emotions that surged in him ever since he’d learned about Luke were terrifying, exhausting, exhilarating. He needed guidance from the only mentor left to him. Yet he also longed for dominance, sovereignty. The absolute power to rule these stars...

 

But…  He dreaded the _silence_ in this place, and in his heart perhaps, that would result. Would he take this royal suite, the only chambers suitable once he assumed the throne? Would he sleep in this too-massive bed with this history-laden furniture – and hells, even the walls themselves – emitting a slowly dissipating echo of Palpatine’s memories, energies, aura? Ghostly remnants of the man’s vitality, humor, severity, and tutelage, fading into nothingness, merging with the faint shades of little-remembered dead galactic predecessors while Vader ruled the Empire? The warlord could not imagine it with anything less than horror, even when he chafed under Palpatine’s control and was sure that Luke would soon be at his side, helping to share responsibilities and at least partly assuage Vader’s terrible loneliness…

 

Vader skimmed merciless deft fingers back up the ruler’s leg, and paid full heed to the volatile psychic tides of the room. Palpatine had ascertained something of the younger man’s ponderings – how could he not, when the Emperor’s mortality was a constant unspoken theme to all their interactions these days? The Dark Lord’s grim concern abruptly surged under Palpatine’s scrutiny, spilling into a darker psychic river of shared mistrust and sensation, merging with their dyad’s tense mutual antipathy and inevitable rivalry. Now he undoubtedly left bruises when he reached the deep tissues of Palpatine’s thigh. Courting danger for a few long moments while he considered countless but hardly new violent and submissive possibilities, Vader finally settled his mood into a deliberate fond companionability.

 

“You received my reports,” he concluded with a slight, nearly arrogant shrug, lessening the pressure and stroking the most severely damaged sinews in a slow circular pattern, his near-caress willing Palpatine to be lenient, to just relax into the pillows and let his dramatic spike in blood pressure subside. To simply accept that some realities – including his Dark Lord’s implacability – could not be changed, and surrender to his aged body’s need for rest. To seek, as Vader tonight mostly did, a rare but urgently important period of restorative peace between them…perhaps the last one before all hells broke loose.  
  
The Emperor seemed almost subdued. He permitted the continued temerity but sighed in a sort of resigned annoyance. “I did. As well as reports from various…enterprising officers in the Fleet. I realize that Demossi, for instance, was a pompous ass... but he served you reasonably well for years.”

 

“He planned to obstruct my search, at each step of the way.”

 

“More than fifty thousand probes, scattered to nearly every corner of the galaxy…?” Palpatine’s tone had become unreadable. “I do not know how we shall absorb the cost.”

 

“Just use my godsdamned salary, then. Or skip the ridiculously expensive presents you plan to give me the next few Ascension Weeks.” As soon as he snapped the words in a surge of unmasked fury and ancient accumulated resentments, the Dark Lord felt a tendril of apprehension snake its way into his own heart. How many commemorations and anniversaries, really, remained in store for Palpatine? How much thought had the ruler already given this exact question, and how angry had Vader just made him with these remarks?

 

The elder Sith, however, seemed outwardly calm, if no longer lulled or nearly serene. “You have a point. It is not as if you enjoy my gifts these days. It is difficult to savor anything, I understand, when one is utterly consumed by obsession.”

 

The Dark Lord stilled his massage in case the conversation continued to deteriorate, lest he injure the man in retaliation and launch them into deadly, inescapable escalation. But he kept his hand resting lightly, in attempted symbolic camaraderie, atop Palpatine’s thigh. “We may as well discuss Ozzel too, then,” he stated smoothly. This would be the most difficult death to justify, given the late admiral’s strong political connections and kinship ties with several of the Core’s most prestigious families.

 

“All for a frozen planet not _even worth taking_ ,” Palpatine hissed, all pretense of equanimity gone. “And some useless dead Rebel rank and file. Nobody worth interrogating. Everyone of real importance escaped, _my champion_.” His golden predator’s eyes were truly intimidating now.  In a nearly revolted gesture of resentment, Palpatine pushed Vader’s hand away. “Including your most precious quarry.”

 

“Oh, I know that far too well.” More easily rebuffed than he would have anticipated, Vader kept his voice measured, without inflection. His thoughts carefully quarantined, Vader pondered how easy it would be to kill his weakened sovereign now. There was something fitting about the monarch dying in his own bed, at the hands of his apprentice, just as Palpatine had murdered his own teacher many decades ago…

 

But Vader would not be baited into it when he was not ready. When the search for Luke was still reaching its zenith. When there was no way he could find Skywalker while managing the Imperial military and all its political affairs as well. The Dark Lord of the Sith, Palpatine’s armored champion, ironically possessed a certain freedom of movement and action that the Emperor–or for that matter, _any_ galactic chancellor or monarch or even the old elected presidents of centuries past – did, had, and could not.

 

“I am so unspeakably weary of all this.” The elder man echoed Vader’s earlier thoughts in an acrid tone of bitter vulnerability. He made a sweeping gesture with tapering white fingers, encompassing the whole suite – and, most likely, the entire galaxy. Profound exhaustion and numbing pessimism suddenly blackened Palpatine’s usually Dark-gleaming aura. The ruler’s emotional reality was an obsidian, starless psychic night, alarming in its uncompromising inky intensity, dousing Vader’s remaining anger like icy water to the face. “You should return to your quarters now, and let us both rest.”

 

“Master.” Stunned, Vader resisted the reckless instinct to again lay hands on his fragile, deadly, capricious mentor, and offered a safer sort of assurance instead:  “Please. I only need a bit—“

 

“A bit more time to find him. Yes, I know. I will do what I can. But the hour is growing very late.”

 

Palpatine, he realized in shock, was trembling. Vader himself repressed a tremor of reaction, unsure whether the monarch referred only to this night. Or whether the words deliberately held more than one meaning. The older Sith rarely spoke without measured, exact intention in every syllable. But Palpatine was, by his own admission and obvious appearance, exceptionally fatigued…

 

 _Force. I must have more time, for all of us… _They _both_ needed Luke, and the kinds of comfort and companionship he could bring, to help renegotiate the terms of their partnership before it imploded into vengeance and assassination, or somehow collapsed beneath both Sith lords’ isolation and discontent.

 

Palpatine shifted slightly, stiffly, in an involuntary near-wince against the cushions. Discomfort that was not Vader’s own briefly swept across the Dark Lord’s consciousness and disappeared. Vader studied him closely. “Your other wounds on Etren were severe…,” he began. Unlike the leg damage that was all too visibly obvious, Palpatine had concealed his lingering back and neck trouble from Vader until recently. “Do you have other injuries – or serious illnesses, perhaps – of which I am unaware?” the warlord rumbled, turning the full intimidating power of the mask to stare down at the older man.

 

“Just order that damned wine, and I will start to feel them less.” The ruler gave a slim smile, as if his words were somehow meant to be reassuring. At least he was no longer insisting that Vader depart. Such mercurial reactions, while never rare for the older Palpatine, had become more extreme in recent years…

 

“Very well. But if you wish to turn over, I can see to the damaged—“

 

“ _No_.” Warning and pleading somehow warred for dominance in that one syllable.

 

Vader blinked behind his mask, stunned by the roiling emotions contained in that single blunt word, and by the third consecutive interruption. Palpatine was almost unfailingly polite in conversation, even just before ice-blue Force-lightning arced into one of his victims…

 

“I paid off Ozzel’s family,” the Emperor continued quietly, behaving as if he were truly calm once more. But his aura said otherwise. “It seemed the best solution. I will not appropriate your ‘godsdamned salary.’ But I shall certainly garnish your estate for reimbursement.”

 

Vader made no direct reply. Instead he inclined his head in a token bow, and gracefully rose from Palpatine’s side. “And now I will see to that wine, and our late-night meal.”

 

“Order whatever you wish.” Palpatine leaned into the cushions, waving his fingers as if in generous benediction.

 

It seemed that oxygen slowly filtered back into the room as both men retreated a few paces from the emotional precipice. The apprentice ignored the slight tremor in his hands as he picked up the gauntlets from the bedclothes.

 

The Dark Lord decided to use the comm unit in the adjoining room, to put more distance between them and give master and student opportunity to collect themselves. He barely registered what he ordered from the kitchens, and was not annoyed, as he usually would be, at the staff’s efforts to stifle their disapproval and alarm at the lateness of the hour.

 

Loath to return to the Emperor’s bedroom merely to wait for the promised twenty minutes until the food arrived, Vader wandered the spacious sitting room, gazing out the windows into the darkened gardens, picking up a stray tome here and there and wincing at their morbid, heretical, or even outright necromantic subject matter, turning on an occasional lamp. He laid down his massive gloves on a priceless side table, and noticed an array of divination cards spread out across the realwood surface.

 

He recognized the deck, which was older than this antique table. It had belonged to Palpatine’s teacher, and to generations of Sith masters before him. Vader had only seen it a few times. The galactic ruler usually put little stock in such simple tools employed by so many non-Sith occult paths, claiming that the cards were no more or less useful than astrology or numerology. Occasionally when Palpatine desired to nudge along or perhaps even play with his powerful natural clairvoyance, he employed candlelight and basins of water, or simply stared into a blazing hearth. Sometimes the Emperor used a looking glass, although not when he was exhausted – when the mirror might become a portal for opportunistic entities he would have to send back to their dimensions of origin…

 

The Dark Lord frowned slightly as he leaned closer, the colors of the antique cards muted in the low lighting of the room but augmented by the mask’s capabilities. The thirty-three Major Arcana usually surfaced in disproportionate numbers when Sith consulted the deck. But these cards before him, no matter their deceptively simple arrangement, were a cornucopia of potent and contradictory meanings.

 

The Scales of Justice. The flaming Castle with its toppling Tower. The Hermit in his cave. The Inquisition. The binding, breaking Wheel of Chance. And, perhaps inevitably, the Sorcerer or Necromancer. Many were reversed. Each of the few Minor Arcana in the layout, against all odds, depicted daggers and swords. Uncertain how much credence to place in occult techniques not specific to their Tradition, Vader struggled to remember the more abstract symbology and what alternate meanings it might have for anyone pledged to Darkness.

 

He was so absorbed that he started slightly when Palpatine entered the room. Walking without his cane, the man displayed no discernible limp – a considerable feat, given the exacting physical therapy he had just endured at Vader’s hands. Moreover, the monarch now wore a long belted robe over his sleeping clothes. Dark forest green trimmed with subtle threads of gold, the velvet garment was nearly formal in its understated tactile luxury. Hooded, the aristocratic ensemble mostly concealed Palpatine’s ashen, aged features. Vader secretly admired his master’s successful performance of elegant dignity, although he guessed the Emperor would pay dearly for his efforts tomorrow…

 

“While you examine my little meditative exercise,” the Emperor said wryly, “you may as well look at the next one too. This was my first deck, actually. From before I inherited my master’s.” He turned slightly and indicated a table a few meters away, his robe susurrating in a liquid murmur upon the marbled floor.

 

Vader followed Palpatine’s gaze and approached the second table. Palpatine did not bother to accompany him. On that surface the elder Sith had dealt an alternate pattern. The newer, brighter cards differed slightly in design, reflecting another time and place of origin. Yet the fraught Major Arcana cards, and their positions, were nearly identical to those in the first arrangement…

 

“They _might_ be telling me something, or somehow responding to galactic events…,” the ruler began in a familiar tutorial tone that suffused Vader with a rare fond nostalgia.

 

“Or perhaps they are reacting to you,” the Dark Lord finished dutifully when the older man trailed off.

 

“Or merely to me,” Palpatine echoed, nodding, staring down at the cards Vader had first noticed. Then he suddenly swept them together in one fluid decisive gesture. With quick, experienced movements, the sovereign wrapped the deck in a rune-embroidered cloth that lay nearby and replaced them in an innocuous box with their quiescent comrades.

 

“Take these with you when you return to _Executor_ ,” Palpatine instructed, straightening away from the table. “Shuffle them several times an evening. Familiarize yourself with them when you feel inclined to do so. Perhaps a change of scenery, or of proprietorship, will teach them proper respect.” A wry dark smile quirked the corner of Palpatine’s mouth, but Vader detected no real humor in the situation.

 

Vader did not know what to say. He was honored, yet loath, to take Palpatine’s revered and hated late master’s divination cards. He did not know if this was some sort of test or a compliment. Force knew that both layouts disturbed him, whether they depicted the complex conditions of the galaxy, so long torn by civil war, or the conflicted state of Palpatine’s labyrinthine soul… And what did the monarch detect in the cards’ dire possible warnings and contradictory symbolism?

 

Without waiting for the Dark Lord’s reply, the ruler set the box next to Vader’s gauntlets and folded his pale hands in his voluminous sleeves. It was a characteristic gesture, yet something in the man’s posture or body language indicated vulnerability all the same. Mingled concern and curiosity prompted one of the few questions Vader did dare ask: “You seem cold. Should I start a fire?”

 

“If you like.” Palpatine’s response was noncommittal, as if he had not been trembling just a few moments ago in the adjoining room, and as if he had not just put on a heavy robe. But Vader merely nodded and bent to the task of kindling a small blaze in the ancient parlor hearth. The elder Sith gracefully rounded the couch and lowered himself into the satin and brocaded cushions.

 

A few moments later Vader joined him on the sofa, deliberately sitting only inches away instead of at the opposite end. He stretched out long booted legs in an attempt to relax as he started into the gathering flames. The silence between them was seemingly companionable for several minutes, but then eerily morphed into an uncomfortable weight in the room. “You never speak of him, you know,” the warlord pointed out, aware that this troubled topic was not the best way to alleviate the renewed tension between them. Yet his curiosity about his master’s dead master, and their dyad’s fatal ending, seemed terribly relevant these days…

 

“No, I do not,” the Emperor agreed, no edge yet in his mild voice. Vader studied what he could see of the man’s aquiline features in the warm glow of the firelight. For a long while, he thought no more would be forthcoming. Only when the Dark Lord’s gaze had wandered back to the hearth did Palpatine add softly: “Obviously his tutelage shaped me profoundly. But I saw no reason to taint or govern _our_ partnership according to the rules or patterns I lived with _him_.”

 

The last word, however quietly spoken, was nearly an epithet. The armored apprentice scrutinized his teacher’s hooded profile again. “’Taint’ is a strong word, my master.” Deliberately Vader injected reverence and warmth into his tone and aura, wishing that the wine were already here.

 

“So it is.” The monarch sighed wearily and stared silently ahead for a few minutes. Then with sudden resolution he straightened into a nearly formal posture and turned to face the younger man. “I have no real guidance for either of us these days,” he explained quietly, his voice hoarse with emotions Vader could not identify. “No wisdom to impart from the ancient books and parchments, or from my final days with him. I cannot teach you anything about this – what you should do, or when exactly to do it, or how either of us should feel.”

 

“I did not mean—“

 

“I never know whether I should avoid you completely. My dread exhausts me. I long for your company, and only yours, when I am this drained.  Or perhaps I should accompany you to the Tower’s sacrificial altar and teach you how to truly do it in style. Why not use my blood as the most potent Sith sacrifice there has been in generations, to cement your rule in sorcerous advantage? To curse Mothma and the Rebellion more cruelly than my limited blood-lettings have managed to achieve…?  Between the wars and the various factions in the High Command, you will need every edge I can give you.” Palpatine’s golden eyes eerily reflected the firelight.

 

Force, this was unbearable. Pain flared in Vader’s chest, and he was not certain to which Sith it rightfully belonged. “Listen to me.” The warlord spoke in short declarative sentences, urgently needing to be understood. “We will do nothing of the sort. You must hang on – we both must – until I find Luke and bring here. He can help us.”

 

He felt the distance begin to grow between them again as Palpatine started to re-gather and reinforce his tattered, weary psychic shields. Yet a fragile partial trust cautiously reverberated through their link, as if the elder man were willing to half-believe him. “Tell me, Master, what you have seen.” He gently prompted Palpatine to recall what the ruler had already predicted more than once: that Skywalker would join them, that the boy would learn from both of them in a trinity of Darkness the likes of which the Sith had not seen since before the days of Darth Bane.

 

“Lately? Nothing new. All my vaunted foresight reveals nothing consistent.” The Emperor broke the intensity of their shared gaze and stared down at his pale wasted hands instead. “Contradictory fragments and alternate endings.  Surreal involuntary visions disintegrating on the threshold between sleeping and waking. Victory. Defeat. Your death. His. Mine, even at Skywalker’s hands. Uncertainty. Chaos.”

 

And this… psychic anarchy…from the most gifted precognitive Talent in untold generations…?  An apprehensive shudder crept down the Dark Lord’s spine, but he kept his voice reassuring and firm. “When I find him,” Vader stated with a certainty he did not truly feel, “perhaps your visions will stabilize. And none of your experiments to prolong your life or transfer your essence have shown success?”

 

A slight flare of anger temporarily reddened Palpatine’s aura, but the ruler did not have the strength to sustain it. “Would I be like this now,” he inquired bitterly, “if they had?”

 

Force help him, the part of Vader that lusted for dominance and an end to his mercurial master’s control reveled in the sovereign’s reply. Yet it was what remained of Anakin Skywalker who startled both men, impulsively reaching out to offer solace – needing to be needed, longing to assuage the suffering of the single mentor and once-beloved friend still left to him. Dreading, just as powerfully as Anakin had feared so long ago – seemingly in another time, another life – that the endless wars might still destroy everything and everyone he valued. Before Vader could think better of it, he slid an ungauntleted hand into the shadows of Palpatine’s hood and caressed the base of the older man’s skull. Palpatine allowed it, so Vader ignored the ruler’s slight restrained flinch of… surprise? Dismay? Unshielded oversensitivity?

 

Scenes from the past arose unbidden, and the Dark Lord did not even know whose memories they were. Images of this ruler, decades younger and vibrantly healthy, his occult potency paradoxically unrecognized yet universally noticed.  Full of taut strength and charisma, Palpatine could draw all eyes to his seemingly mundane sleek form with merely an elegant gesture or a few well-modulated words… The sheer power the man radiated when it was only Anakin and the Chancellor, Vader and the Emperor, alone together in Palpatine’s Senate office or these Palace chambers. Or anyplace in this entire galaxy... Memories of Etren suddenly haunted Vader, too – renewed camaraderie born of crisis and mutual need, and Palpatine re-learning, albeit all too temporarily, that he did not need to avoid his champion’s touch…

 

But the monarch would not let himself be comforted. He forged on relentlessly: “I am not certain I am the teacher I meant to be. I do not know whether, at the critical moment, I can assist you with the transition and just bare my throat to you. Self-discipline is one thing. But survival instinct….”

 

Vader injected Persuasion into his voice, practically desperate to derail this nightmare conversation. Murmuring the words as if he soothed an injured feral animal, the Dark Lord repeatedly alluded to their dialogue of months ago, in a nearly incantatory fashion: “We need only endure a little longer. Luke will be here with you when I cannot. You will soon have a new student, and Force knows he needs our combined tutelage after all the lies Kenobi taught him. He will assist me with the Fleet, and I will be here more frequently. Together we will find the tenets of immortality that your teacher promised.”

 

“I killed him too soon,” Palpatine continued, refusing to be lulled, his chilling words almost inaudible. “I had no choice… But may sweet Darkness forgive me, I had not learned everything yet. He carefully rationed his esoteric knowledge; he kept me waiting for nearly each piece of information…”

 

“Master.” With careful but insistent cybernetic strength, Vader drew the ruler’s head down to his broad armored shoulder and massaged the rigid cords at the nape of Palpatine’s neck, willing away the tension headache he could feel building there. The man seemed to weigh nothing against him, as if he were made of birds’ bones, hollow and fragile. Or as if he were half-dead already…

 

A revenant kept alive only by sheer will, wrapped in necromancy and velvet…

 

The Dark Lord managed to repress a deep shudder of avid ambitious desire and morbid near-revulsion. “My son is a Jedi, and almost certainly a healer,” Vader reminded, echoing those wistful sentiments Palpatine himself had hinted at, just several weeks – and yet seemingly years – ago. “His talents can help you. With more time, we can find your master’s precious secrets at long last.”

 

For many moments Palpatine said nothing. Then he only nodded against the younger man’s shoulder. Vader felt the lack of conviction in the belated gesture. Now finally was the opportunity he’d needed for so very long. But it required nearly infinite patience on his part. These things could not be rushed.

 

“Ozzel and the others be damned,” Vader said in a low passionate rumble, “I would have come here days ago had I only realized how exhausted you are.”

 

The Dark Lord closed his eyes, reaching out through their psychic link to “see” Palpatine’s troubled aura. The black weariness and pessimism roiled the man’s soul anew – and now were accompanied by a strong self-loathing. The last genuinely surprised Vader, who had never previously tasted this particular cocktail of vulnerability in him. Torn between opportunistic designs and protective alarm, the apprentice resisted the urge to gather the fading monarch to him tightly, possessively, in an implacable iron grip.

 

Twenty-odd years ago, Anakin Skywalker would have done it unhesitatingly. But twenty years ago, Vader would not have briefly imagined risking both their lives by crushing the man’s fragile skeleton in his cybernetic embrace…

 

He shoved the murderous temptation away, wanting in equal measure to carry Palpatine back to the bedroom and push the despair out of his mind…to force the elder Sith, and thus himself, to simply rest. To let them both ignore the event horizon at which they had lingered for so long already…

 

But instead Vader relaxed further into the cushions, Palpatine still leaning into him. It was like coaxing a wary, wounded stag in the forest….  “Why,” he murmured, “did Kalendra or Filene not tell me?”

 

“I forbade them, of course.” Palpatine answered truthfully enough, at least. It was more than Vader would have gotten from him an hour ago.

 

“Ah.” Unsurprised, Vader swallowed an irritated retort and stroked his thumb across the ruler’s temple.  This was suddenly a deliberate seduction, a wooing, the likes of which Vader had never needed to practice since first courting the woman who became his wife. So very long ago. The memories were less painful these days, and yet the younger Sith’s heart ached from the poignancy of the parallel, and from Palpatine’s obvious turmoil and fatigue. Even in the midst of Vader’s strongest ambitions and hatred, he had never actively wished his master’s suffering…

 

Not fully immune to the hypnotic glamour he wove, the warlord deepened the intimacy of the moment. He nearly purred, “My meditations indicate that Skywalker is more likely to venture out in plain sight, so to speak, if he thinks he can confront me directly. He senses, even if he has not been told about, the primal and organic nature of our bond.”

 

The sovereign tensed but did not pull away. “And?” Palpatine asked tonelessly.

 

Vader pressed ahead, silently pleading with the fates that his spell would hold. He dared not risk a heavier psychic or physical touch. “He is more likely to flee strangers – Intelligence operatives, Imperial functionaries, even Force-sensitive investigators – than he is to avoid me personally.”

 

“Do you truly believe that?” Palpatine straightened away to sit erect once more. Vader dropped his hand and secretly cursed himself, and the ruler’s proud isolate nature, for breaking the mood. The Emperor’s panther eyes bored into Vader’s mask. “He ran from you at Hoth. He avoids you quite successfully now. Despite fifty thousand expensive probe droids.”

 

The Dark Lord gritted his teeth at the implied criticism, but kept his voice smooth: “Yes. But why risk driving him farther into hiding? If I am the only one who pursues him, I can track wherever he may go, and follow him relentlessly. And I have his physical welfare in mind; why risk someone else harming him in the chase?”

 

They both skirted around the topic now – of precisely which sorts of agents, and how many, Palpatine had employed to find Luke. Palpatine denied nothing, but neither had he admitted that his Force-hunters existed so many years after the Purge, much less that they now pursued Luke. Had they been authorized to kill the young man rather than allow another escape, in vengeance for the Death Star’s destruction? For young Skywalker’s Light Side training? For his growing role, much like the Organa princess, as a figurehead for the restoration of Jedi repression and the dysfunctional Republic? 

 

How far, exactly, would the ruler go to end the danger he believed Luke posed to his Empire, or to the possibility of galactic peace? The threat Luke represented to the Sith Tradition?  Or perhaps more personally, to the emotionally troubled Vader or the failing, newly vulnerable Emperor?

 

Palpatine stared into the blazing fireplace once more. “I will certainly consider what you have said tonight. All of it.” His tone seemed more fatalistic and empty than reassuring.

 

Vader repressed a protest at the noncommittal response and inclined his head in acknowledgement. Just when he considered what to say next, the chime to the suite reverberated quietly. “Ah. Our late dinner or early breakfast,” he announced, rising to answer the door.

 

The warlord nodded tersely to the intimidated kitchen functionary, who swallowed hard and wheeled in a cart of clattering glassware, cutlery, and dishes. When the servant had gratefully departed, Vader unstopped the carafe of wine and poured a generous amount of gleaming crimson into two goblets. He placed one before the Emperor on the low table before the couch, and recognized the irony of hoping the man would partake, to blunt the edges of Palpatine’s disturbing and rather contagious grim emotions.

 

Finally, although the suite had been atmospherically ready for quite some time, the armored apprentice detached his helmet and mask with a hiss of pressurized air. The low lighting in the room caused no discomfort for his damaged retinas. In his concern at Palpatine’s weariness, he had mostly ignored his own growing fatigue, and being freed of the heavy headgear made him breathe a silent sigh of relief.

  
Putting the gleaming apparatus aside, Vader uncovered the platters of food and assessed their variety. Without asking whether the elder Sith wanted anything, Vader simply ignored the probability of refusal. Based on years of experience with Palpatine’s reclusive appetites and asceticism under pressure, he arranged a minimalistic yet visually harmonious small plate of cheeses and fruit and set it on the table before the galactic sovereign.

 

Vader prepared a much larger serving of roasted meats and accompanying side dishes, with which he returned to the couch, once again sitting only several inches from the Emperor. “We were discussing the agents you employed to search for Luke,” the Dark Lord reminded, careful not to pressure Palpatine with his gaze. Instead Vader drank deeply from his own goblet.

 

“No. _You_ were attempting to raise the topic, when you have quite enough to concern yourself with already.” Palpatine’s admonishment was not harsh, but his spike of resentment was obvious. “Do you believe, after so many years, that my methods are unsubtle? Unpracticed? Ineffective?”

 

“Of course not.” Now Vader was glad he had not met the Emperor’s eyes. He stared into the flames for a few minutes, eating some sort of salad he did not taste.

 

“Excellent; I doubted you would be that unwise.” Palpatine drained his glass. Vader poured him more and wished the man would eat something.

 

After consuming several mouthfuls in what was becoming an awkward silence, the younger Sith said, “Losing the Hoth base truly did damage the Rebellion.” He was still slightly stung – for his officers’ sakes as well as his own – by Palpatine’s implication that the battle had achieved nothing of importance. “They suffered heavy casualties and lost much of their vital equipment. We took many larger weapons – only some of them seized from our forces in previous battles. Jenrelm is aggressively investigating potential arms suppliers.”

 

“I received his report, as well as yours.” Palpatine gave up any pretense of interest in his plate and settled back into the cushions with his wine.

 

Uncertain if the monarch would say more, or if this were merely another reprimand, Vader nodded and waited. He watched the older man stare into the fireplace, apparently lost in thought, his arthritic pale hands toying with the delicate stem of his wineglass. Without his mask, the Dark Lord had difficulty reading the subtler clues in Palpatine’s expression or eyes. But his intuitive sense and their Force-link were another matter. The bleak, black mood had stolen over his master fully, and Vader seriously contemplated how he might arrange for some kind of medical intervention or evaluation…

 

A few minutes later, Vader pushed away his mostly empty plate. There was no way to make Palpatine seek anyone’s help, or confide more than he was willing to admit to his Dark Lord. For the first time, the younger Sith found himself ironically wishing that Akim Tarkin were still alive and spending too much time at the Palace. The man had been Vader’s primary military and political rival, and deserved death for what he did to Alderaan.  But Tarkin had also undeniably cared about the Emperor’s well-being, and had provided companionship at social functions that Vader mostly eschewed. He’d been at least something of a friend or confidant to Palpatine during the Dark Lord’s long absences with the Fleet….

 

“Alderaan changed everything,” Palpatine mused, startling Vader out of his grim reverie. Despite the sovereign’s physical decline, there was no denying his continued impressive psychic potency.

 

The flesh prickled at the back of Vader’s neck as he gazed at Palpatine’s falconlike profile and debated how exactly to respond in this minefield of a fraught topic. So much needed saying, and all of it dangerous. How in all the galaxy’s many hells could he possibly reply, and do the answer justice – and manage to survive the consequences?

 

 _Yes, and I told you not to build that damned battle station…?_ It was the absolute truth. Yet he was not willing to tempt Palpatine’s retaliatory response. The ruler seemingly forgot nothing. Vader’s initial blunt – and occasionally crude – warnings as it was being constructed still carried risk enough now, even all these years later. To say nothing of the potentially fatal argument they’d had upon the Dark Lord’s return to Coruscant after the Death Star’s destruction. In that exchange, the two Sith had flung words that could never be unsaid – bitter vengeful recriminations almost as dangerous as the lightsabers and sorcery both men pondered wielding in that horrifying quarter- or half-hour…

 

Thank Darkness neither of them had resorted to such a thing. But Vader vividly recalled all of it. He had stared at Palpatine’s too-slender back when the Emperor had turned away from him in resentment and seeming contempt. The younger Sith had seriously contemplated whether he might simply overpower the man with sheer physical force. Now, more than two dozen months later, he could still taste that desire to claim the Throne and avenge Alderaan simultaneously, in one triumphant, violent moment…

_Yes, but we will put things right again…?_ Things had not been “right” in the Empire, or with their dyad, for a very long while…. And, if it were even possible, things had deteriorated even more when they’d learned from Death Star security footage that the battle station’s destroyer had in fact been the Dark Lord’s long-lost son, presumed dead in utero for these past two decades.

 

 _It did, but there is no point in discussing it now…?_ But if not now, then when? More than two years had elapsed, and the Sith lords had never really dared converse again about the matter, which festered between them more and more…

 

 _And fuck you, Master, for what you have done to us…!_ The furious thought emerged unbidden from somewhere deep within, and thus perhaps too unshielded. Vader felt a sharp twinge of trepidation.

 

“So, when are you leaving me this time?” The edge to the ruler’s voice made Vader assume the worst. Palpatine now studied him directly.

 

“In a day or two.” The Dark Lord kept his tone smooth and calm. “After I take care of some routine matters here. But I will see you tomorrow evening, almost certainly.”

 

The older man merely nodded. His eyes gleamed eerily in crimson and gold, reflecting the flames beneath the shadows of the velvet hood.

 

“On the other hand, _Executor_ is receiving constant telemetric feedback from the probe droids,” Vader explained needlessly. “If we get any promising leads while I am here—“

 

“Of course,” Palpatine replied, his tone unreadable. “Fifty-six thousand datastreams will keep you tremendously busy.”

 

“It is not as if I analyze all of them personally…”

 

“Well, perhaps you do not. But your officers indicate that you care about little else.”

 

For a moment, the Dark Lord was stunned into silence. Trepidation morphed into outright dread, crawling up the base of his spine. “Master.  Please understand that –“

 

“It is extremely late,” the older man interrupted as if he had just realized the hour. With as much dignity and sinuous grace as if he’d never been wounded, the Emperor rose like an emerald-and-gold serpent uncoiling upward from the couch, pondering whether to strike. Hypnotized by the ruler’s amber gaze, as if he stared into the eyes of a Selonian water cobra, the Dark Lord belatedly climbed to his feet. 

 

Before Vader could further react, Palpatine reached up and touched his face. “My champion.” In a strange sort of near-fondness Palpatine stroked a scarred cheekbone, then let his hand fall away. “I _do_ understand you… Far more than you can know.”

 

The apprentice could only study him in puzzled astonishment, inexplicably chilled to the bone, his face burning with icy flame.

 

“So, my Anakin, I will say good night.” With seemingly effortless fluidity, Palpatine glided past him and re-entered the bedchamber. Lest the Dark Lord wonder where he was wanted next, the door’s formidable security mechanisms audibly locked and engaged, sealing the older man into his sanctuary…

 

For several more minutes Vader stood there in the waning firelight. He was somehow both enraged and frightened to the depths of his very soul…

 

 

 

 


	3. Tarot and Terror, Or, The Game Never Ends When Your Whole World Depends on the Turn of a Friendly Card

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their fraught conversations during one of Lord Vader's increasingly rare visits home to Coruscant, the two Sith lords retire to their separate chambers to contemplate their grim pasts and potential, even darker, probable futures.
> 
> The soundtrack to much of this story is the Alan Parsons Project "Turn of a Friendly Card" album. A classic!

 

 

As soon as the doors closed behind him with a well-oiled mechanical whisper, Palpatine limped the rest of the way to his bed. Hitherto suppressed responses to the evening’s fraught interactions began to wrack his frame with spasms of belated shivering. He had to wrap cold shaking fingers around an antique carved bedpost to lower his aching body onto the mattress. He could only recline against the high cushions in slow motion, his back muscles seizing with the effort.

 

_Oh, yes. I understand you, my champion… far more than you realize…_

 

In his existential fatigue, Palpatine had, with shocking rapidity, become unable to tolerate the intensity of the emotions pulsating through their seldom-used Force-link. Despite Vader’s formidable shields, the Emperor’s sorcerous senses had caught tantalizing, frightening fragments of his Dark Lord’s thoughts and reactions. Concerned and intrigued by the elder Sith’s undisguisable weakness and exhaustion, Vader obviously wished to comfort Palpatine but also, no doubt, to destroy him. Equally disquieting was the ruler’s involuntary traitorous lonely lassitude, which had implicitly encouraged Vader to lull him into submission. Most alarming, however, was Palpatine’s surely suicidal desire to simply surrender to Vader’s increasingly seductive ministrations and Persuasion-limned strategic suggestions.

 

To rely on his pupil and get some sorely needed rest… To focus solely upon his attempts at bodily transfer. To let Vader, at least temporarily, administer the Fleet, the war, even the Empire…

 

After all, the younger Sith wished to control the search for his ill-begotten son… And given Vader’s  numerous vaunted criticisms of politicians, diplomacy, Imperial bureaucracy, and the recently defunct Senate, the Dark Lord would indisputably relish the opportunity, however limited – or perhaps permanent, should Palpatine’s occult experiments go very badly indeed, – to determine policy here at the Capital… Long frustrated by Vader’s periodic complaints about all things governmental, Palpatine found this new determination gratifying even as he was self-protectively alarmed at its implications.

 

When exactly had Anakin grown up so completely? Precisely when had the Dark Lord become a full-fledged Sith master in his own right – brilliant, commandingly persuasive, and increasingly capable of intimidating even his formidable master upon occasion?

 

Somehow while Palpatine had been distracted by other matters, his student had fully ripened into a Sith Lord surpassing the Emperor’s expectations – compelling, potent, deadly. Exactly what the ruler wanted. Even more than he had anticipated years ago. And Palpatine was quite aware that his demands had never been lenient, nor his tutelage forgiving….

 

Despite Anakin’s maiming and years of grueling, partial physical and emotional recovery from near death, as well as the many handicaps of Jedi training and sometimes ungovernable emotions, Vader had somehow become Palpatine’s most glorious creation, both because of and despite the ruler’s many instructions and intentions. Vader had achieved an electric dynamism and natural authority that were, frankly, magnificent.

 

If his spiritual tradition had permitted faith in things miraculous, Palpatine would offer thanks to the Darkness itself for this sublime development.

 

And if Palpatine had been less rigorously indoctrinated in self-preservation – an education harshly learnt, expensively bought, and now too instinctive for him to abandon – things might go easier for both Sith now. But his dearly purchased autonomy, and the grim schooling his own master had imparted, would permit no willing relaxation of the terrible isolation their discipline demanded both men suffer. Even recognizing their mutual tragedy, and his apprentice’s nearly irresistible mature Dark allure, the Emperor could not let himself be tempted into treacherous promises of cooperation.

 

Every lesson from the past taught him that Vader’s offers of help – no matter their sincerity – surely camouflaged the chains of dependency and potential death. He dared not be lured by Vader’s tantalizing Jedi-Sith siren song offering an impossible alternative future of interdependency, comfort, and a peaceful dyad, or triad, of equals…

 

_“You cannot make me murder you,” Vader had announced only a few months after his Turning, mere weeks after surviving Kenobi’s assassination attempt. “I do not care about untold pairs of dead Sith. We are not like them. You and I are better than that…”_

 

His trembling increased for a moment, and Palpatine closed his burning eyes. Breathing deeply for several minutes, he slowly reached a nearly meditative state, willing himself to a disciplined calm that transcended the physical and emotional challenges that clamored for his attention.

 

A quarter of an hour later, his excess passions were safely – or at least mostly – compartmentalized in his labyrinthine soul once more. Palpatine glanced at the realbook he hadn’t really managed to focus on anyway. Before Vader’s unexpected arrival, the sovereign had stared at the passages for nearly an hour, his exhausted, troubled mind unable to make any headway in the author’s difficult occult theses about meditation and astral travel and soul transfer. An ancient text, written by a heretical and possibly insane Sith sorcerer whose theories were controversial even in the man’s centuries-ago lifetime, its pages should have held Palpatine’s interest. But he’d struggled to maintain the level of scholarly concentration needed to do justice to the intricate, dense philosophical treatise.

 

It had already been late at night when Palace Security had announced the Dark Lord’s shuttle’s early arrival. Even then, vague tendrils of headache had lurked behind Palpatine’s eyes. Now they slowly inched up his unyielding shoulders and neck in defiance of Vader’s ministrations. Waiting for the opportunity, no doubt, to explode into a full-fledged migraine…

 

Sighing, he abandoned the book to the bedside table. With a grimace and a suppressed groan he could afford to half-utter in Vader’s absence – and Force knew he would pay tomorrow for tonight’s displays of physical fortitude and grace – he sat up again. Ignoring the burning throbbing in his leg, he rose to his feet and limped to the adjoining area that served as his private office and sitting room.

 

The desk drawers contained several interesting items: weaponry and poison; the sensitive and esoteric correspondence he wrote by hand on creamy vellum stationary and concluded with his distinctive signature and seal of office; even a few sentimental and elegant keepsakes given to him by an even smaller number of beings for whom he felt genuine emotion…

 

They were all dead now. Or at least nearly so…

  
_As Your Majesty soon will be. Very soon, in fact, if you do not find the answers you seek…_ The thought mocked him, as such thoughts inevitably did, in his deceased master’s voice.

 

One deep drawer housed his secret bottle of lightly spiced blossom wine – the flower-nectars and pale grapes from his official home planet keeping illicit company with the most subtle strains of glitterstim this astonishingly far-flung and corrupt galaxy had yet managed to produce.  The result was a highly illegal, widely coveted, and shockingly expensive concoction that famously dulled the edges of any seemingly intolerable physical or emotional trauma.

 

Darkness knew he felt both sorts of pain tonight, in defiance of all his efforts at stoic resolve…

 

A wry smile curved his thin lips despite himself. Vader, his glorious tainted former Jedi moralist, would no doubt be shocked if he knew that Palpatine possessed this beverage, and somewhat angry at how he had obtained it. But absolute power conferred enough dangerous privileges and perquisites to corrupt even a saint, or a former Jedi-advised Chancellor of the Old Republic once renowned for his avuncular respectability and moral rectitude. Certainly enough to tempt an ascetic but soul-weary (and, in his own ways, quite tainted by decades of unavoidable contact with the Outside) Sith ruler…

 

_A jaded fatigue that even Anakin will one day, early enough, discover in his own right._

 

Force knew, despite their many conflicts over the years, he had never wanted this kind of suffering for Vader, who had already endured too much…

__

_And your dearest student will learn this torment quite soon, if you do not attempt something new – something reckless – and if you do not do it now.  Will you finally learn this, and teach him the immortality your master grasped, and which you falsely promised in your turn?_

 

“I have attempted everything,” Palpatine whispered in half-defiant despair. Only insane, deadly methods remained untried at this point…

_You are already dying. Do you want him to die at the hands of his own son decades from now?_

Shaken by this horrific possibility he had not let himself ponder until this moment, he nearly dropped the fabulously expensive bottle to the floor. The prospect was almost literally unthinkable. Obscene.  Perhaps it would be a just ending for a Sith who prioritized his Jedi offspring over his master of decades. But, no matter; the notion profoundly and inexplicably sickened the ruler all the same.

 

Flecks of silver and gold swirled in the wine. Promises of a temporary numbness that Palpatine once would have mocked and proudly eschewed glimmered in its pale depths…

 

Or he could put away the drugged libation, go to Vader’s quarters now, and secure the man’s tacit promises of assistance before the Dark Lord changed his mind. He could accept Vader’s unspoken invitation to peaceful collaboration and companionship, no matter how long such a fragile ceasefire might actually endure.

 

To have help with his frantic occult research, his dangerous, draining – and occasionally terrifying – forays into the perilous forbidden and liminal spaces between life and death, body and spirit… To benefit from the intellectual stimulation and breathtaking moments of audacious insight that he appreciated (although perhaps not frequently enough) from his warlord’s splendid mind…

 

After all, he urgently wished to give Vader another project. To distract the Dark Lord from his obsession with his son. From the child who should never have existed.

 

The Jedi with the power to destroy Vader and Palpatine and everything the Sith had achieved.

 

Against his will, Palpatine momentarily thought of that woman who had once been his Senate protégée… Ludicrously firm in her resolve and sure of her Force-blind but real political intuition, she had managed to convince herself that only her most treasured friends suspected her pregnancy. But he, the secret Sith lurking in their midst, thoroughly monitoring for sheer survival’s sake everyone around him, had known almost from the beginning – even before she herself did, he suspected. Certainly before Anakin knew.

 

Yet almost until the end he had pretended ignorance of her forbidden life with his Chosen One. He’d feigned shock at Anakin’s guilty revelation. As if she had not already for months been too awkward in her gait, in unattractive conical dresses that revealed as much as they concealed…

 

But Palpatine had kept their secret, as if it were as precious or enormous as his own unspoken Truths. Until she was dead and he took the Throne, and there were suddenly no longer any secrets to safeguard….

 

Or so he and Vader had thought. Then, out of nowhere, nearly two decades later, like a specter from the ruler’s worst nightmares, Luke Skywalker had appeared…

 

Jedi-trained – _beautiful_ – treacherous.

 

A bomb hurled into their lives.

 

Had this stolen heir and brash, undeserving – _but strangely compelling_ – protégé appeared to them years ago, Palpatine might have gracefully adjusted and recovered. But for it to happen just when he was unequivocally dying by slow degrees, seemingly unable to recover from the devastation of it all…

 

The injustice of this fate still woke him in the middle of the night. It still sent him retching to the ‘fresher several times a week.

 

And it was bittersweet consolation at best to recall the ancient dictum that the Dark Side most grievously tested its most Talented and devoted acolytes…

 

The ruler’s steadfastly unremembered and unexamined childhood.... Maul’s death, and then years of concealed loneliness.  Decades of involuntary self-derision while Senator Palpatine practiced ignoble subterfuge in the midst of venal politicians and base Jedi... Too many performances of a mundane role that eventually tainted his true personality: sacred acts of profane degradation necessitated and sanctioned by the demands of his Tradition. Holy war and historical vengeance, achieved at last for all his damned, dead ancestry – yet at the cost of unacknowledged accumulated damages to his dignity, to his very soul.

The Purge, the endless damned wars, Vader’s near death at Kenobi’s hands… The Sith’s inevitable estrangement… But now also discovering the theft of Anakin’s child, this traitor-successor who should have been their child…and a comfort, perhaps, to the Emperor in these last painful months…?

 

It was simply too much.

_And knowing that Luke’s return may be the only thing worse than his abduction from us in the first place…?_

 

When would the Tradition consider the price finally paid, and cease its demands for unbearable sacrifice?

_Ah, sweet Darkness, the Great Unknowable Source, my only Lover, how were our many vast oblations still insufficient for your unfathomable purposes?_

_How in all the hells can I possibly steer my soul through these latest tempests?_

When no matter what Palpatine did, his destiny might be to be smashed upon the rocks? After all, that was usually the fate of all Sith. And only now, almost in his ninth decade, did he fully fathom the nearly impossible cruelty of simply accepting that end as inevitably proper. Of pretending it was seemly.

 

And merely meters away, his warlord’s presence gleamed and thrummed and shamed and beckoned to him like a shining ebon beacon on the barren shores of Palpatine’s soul’s bottomless sea, calling to his weary spirit, pulling on the etheric tether uniting their innermost essences…

 

Force knew that no one save all those long-dead masters of his ruthless Tradition could blame him if he did weaken and give in. If he did change – or end, but perhaps peacefully – his life merely by limping over to the adjoining suite…

 

Literally no living being in this galaxy could begin to comprehend, much less endure, what those icy masters unfeelingly demanded of him. And for Palpatine, admittedly contaminated by Outsiders for decades, involuntarily marinated in their seductive storybook ideas of friendship and family – of love as the great equalizer, the justification of all deeds?  The one thing permitted to trump ancestry, history, duty…? For the ruler, the impermissible conflict had somehow become insurmountable, intolerable.

 

_“You and I are better than that…We do not have to live – or die – like they did.”_

 

Even all those years ago, the boy’s words had twisted something in his chest…

 

Force. He should trust in his golden-hearted, golden-haired apprentice and go to Anakin’s suite now, before it grew any later. The ruler would only confess what Vader had already sensed anyway. He could set aside some of his vast isolation and reveal at least a portion of his difficulties and need.

 

At minimum, he could request assistance with the growing agony ravaging his skull like a conqueror’s army, drowning out focus and Discernment. Or seek help for the comparatively quiet and thus perhaps more insidious weeks-old ache beneath his sternum, throbbing dully in time with his distressed pulse…

 

And by such a terrifying yet simple surrender of self, he might, just possibly, manage to re-stake a lifetime’s worth of claims on his Dark Lord’s heart and soul. And thus, perhaps, still fulfill Sith purposes even while infected by Outsider sentimentality…

 

Pain lanced through his temple like a warning, temporarily catching his breath and tripping his heartbeat into a short galloping arrhythmia. Startling him into sanity once more:  _Surrender…!?_

 

_You have become a sentimental fool.  All the more pathetic when he turns on you at last…_

 

And had he not just finally, fully realized that Vader was no longer the boy he had once claimed and known?  Imposing, glorious and terrifying in his regal isolation, the warlord was, by any measure that truly mattered, every bit as intimidating, self-possessed and ruthless as any of his Sith predecessors.

 

The Dark Lord was, Palpatine reminded himself, his most magnificent accomplishment – his legacy to future generations of the Sith and the Empire. By comparison the ruler’s needs and desires were irrelevant.

 

He could veritably hear the approval in his dead master’s own words, as if the man were now standing next to him: _You have always known what you must do, despite your corruption by legions of non-Sith. Persevere. Alone. Immortality is in your grasp, and therefore his, if only you have the strength and courage to reach out and seize it._

_So leave bad enough alone, my boy, and drink away your pain._

 

That is what he did these endless nights, after all.  Truly, it was his best option at this point – the safest choice for him and the Tradition.

 

Raising a weary toast to the inner voice, Palpatine sighed and drank directly from the flask.

 

 

 

 

 

Nearly an hour after Palpatine had dismissed him, the Dark Lord felt no closer to relaxation or sleep. A couple more hours would bring the dawn and the Palace’s hundreds of round-the-clock personnel, diurnal staff, and political guests would begin to stir for a new busy day. Not for the first time, Vader was grateful that this massive supporting cast had learned to take his intermittent – and, not infrequently, rather dramatic – visits in fairly good stride; no one would likely disturb him this morning unless the need were imperative.

 

Not even the Emperor, whose abrupt desire to rid himself of Vader’s company had been all too obvious… Vader nearly wished he had not bothered to rush here tonight, and that he’d simply arrived in the bright light of mid-morning, as originally scheduled. He’d deducted things about Palpatine’s condition that he might otherwise not have learned, to be sure – but he was not certain exactly what the hells he was now supposed to do with the information.

 

While knowledge of Palpatine’s vast weary depression was theoretically a strategic edge over the elder man, the truth remained that the Dark Lord had also found the Sith ruler as intimidating as ever. In fact, the Emperor might arguably be at his most dangerous in these final months or years (weeks?), particularly as his desperation grew while his stamina so obviously weakened and he was still unable to find Plagueis’ alleged secrets for achieving eternal life…

 

And at three in the morning after the sort of disturbing, cryptic encounter he’d just experienced with Palpatine – his face still burned where his master had stroked it for only a few seconds – Vader had to resist the urge to re-don his armor and mask and simply retreat to his country estate or back to his star destroyer. He regretted his earlier implied assurances that he’d spend most of today with his mercurial, difficult master.

 

_“My champion… I do understand you. Far more than you can know.”_

What in all the Sith hells did that even mean?

 

Drinking heartily from his overfull snifter of brandy, Vader growled under his breath for the second or third time. Pacing having availed him no new insights or resolution, he finally settled at the massive leather-topped desk in his private study. In an oddly eager near-dread he reached for the divination deck that had belonged to Palpatine’s master – and, given the cards’ cracked, softened edges and the tendrils of images that arose in the Dark Lord’s mind’s eye while he shuffled the deck at least a dozen times – to several generations of Sith before him.

 

As he had half expected, the antique cards were scandalized, emanating wispy Force-admonitions that the middle-aged warlord – _but a mere child in Darkness…!_ – was unworthy of this august privilege.  Ignoring the implied insults, he gathered focus and committed himself to separate, complex seventeen-card general readings for each Sith, only to receive two internally contradictory and highly ambivalent responses. Many of the cards lay inverted, which only exacerbated their ambiguity. Even the cards representing the past seemed to fit neither Vader’s youth nor the admittedly few details he knew of Palpatine’s enigmatic background. The Dark Lord frowned and mixed the cards thoroughly a third time, unsure whether to be concerned or relieved that thus far the deck’s direst representations – more graphic and less euphemistic than any of the divination cards he’d seen elsewhere – had not appeared…

 

It was Vader’s turn to be admonitory, directing his formidable willpower at the cards in his hands while he cut the deck three times and laid out a much simpler five-card design. He focused upon the Emperor’s distress this evening, and the inextricably linked question of the ruler’s probable fate. Such short efficient readings were intended to answer specific, direct questions with reasonably straightforward responses. The Past, the Present, the Future; the Seeker and his Query; and finally the Answer.

 

Nothing of value. The only Major Arcana card in the layout apparently mocked Vader, the Seeker. The cards seemed to murmur sibilantly just beyond the range of his augmented hearing. _Impudent boy: if you insist on this Fool’s errand a mere hour before dawn, we shall certainly call you the Fool that you are…_ In response to the Seeker and Query, only the Dunce stared up at him in dimwitted glee…

And the cards’ Answer? Merely a Minor Arcana card suggesting the need for prudence. As if Vader had not spent his life with Palpatine trying to learn and exercise caution in every possible way – particularly in his visits home to Coruscant.

 

The Dark Lord sighed and swept the cards together again, swirling them around the desktop with frustrated, exhausted near-abandon, seeking one last opportunity for insight before he collapsed into his massive waiting bed and slept through breakfast and possibly lunch as well. In his admittedly damaged peripheral vision, the sinuous red designs on the backs of the cards seemed to slither and move of their own accord...

 

Many mystics and seers developed unique layouts of their own devising, and Vader intuitively grabbed three cards from the disapproving chaos of the scattered mixed deck, laying them before him on the leather surface. He judged it as valid as any other spread, reflecting the occult or sacred Three of so many varied galactic cultures. He thought of his late wife’s ancient, goddess-based religion, which Palpatine, ostensibly also from Naboo (although Vader had his own doubts about that), knew intimately even if the ruler actually believed in no deities…

 

Maiden, Mother, Crone… 

 

Youth, adulthood, withered old age…

 

Apprentice, Adept, Master…

 

The atmosphere in the room suddenly shifted interestedly, or some etheric energy whispered in his head: as if someone or something were finally seeing him as a Talented adept in his own right, and not simply a pupil with pretensions. Not just another fallen Jedi.  No mere adjunct to Plagueis’ upstart apprentice...!

 

Not letting himself get distracted by anger at the implied insults – _and how in the hells could a damned pack of cards be so obviously judgmental?_ – or by vainglorious satisfaction at the grudging validation, Vader turned them over with deliberation. Now Major Arcana finally clamored forward, flirting with him shamelessly in their wanton painted glory, as Vader studied them one by one still thinking about his Master. The Moon. The Scales of Justice. Finally, the Sorcerer, but reversed. A seemingly ignominious end… He wished he were more surprised by the dark representations and possibilities, but at least part of him remained detached – wary of Plagueis’ cards’ intentions.

 

Vader gathered the entire deck again and shuffled several times. He cut the cards and pulled out the top three, turning them face up one at a time, the way that some Jedi played with divination decks to hone their meditations before bed, or before going into battle. Light Side, Dark Side, and the Living Force (which Palpatine also did not believe in, but that fact was irrelevant to Vader’s purposes): _“What I should always be, what I should never be, what the Force would have me become.”_

Past, Present, Future…

 

One, two, three…. First came the Sorcerer again, this time upright. Then War. Then Illness, Pestilence, or (of course) Plague.

 

Vader pondered Palpatine’s obviously growing debility. Was this merely the objective truth of the man’s impending fate? Or were the cards referencing their previous owner, making a sort of occult pun? Frowning, the warlord tried once more, almost wishing the cards were still aloof in his hands, still playing hard to get. One, two, three – for Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and the Emperor Palpatine. The images that shimmered in his fatigue-blurring vision were almost mockingly clear and straightforward: The Champion of Swords. The Wheel of Chance and its steely manacles and chains. Skeletal, cowled Death.

 

In many esoteric traditions, practitioners believed the Death card rarely indicated physical demise. Instead it symbolized transformation, evolution, a new path or revelation. Those possibilities certainly might apply in this situation, given their discovery of Luke’s existence and Palpatine’s plan to divine the secrets of immortality. But in the unforgiving Sith Tradition, violent death of some kind nearly always awaited its most devoted adherents. Sith tended to take the Death card very literally most of the time…

 

He tried twice more, mixing the cards thoroughly each time, and continued to get similar results. He was not sure if Plagueis’ cards simply enjoyed his discomfiture – or perhaps relished the notion of Palpatine’s, should Vader (unlikely) decide to tell him about these results – or were finally giving him accurate readings. Either way, he was drained and angry, resentful of seemingly the entire Tradition itself. He rewrapped the deck in its fragile silk scarf and laid the cards gingerly in their carved antique box.

 

Then he stared at nothing for several minutes, uncertain of everything except that Darth Plagueis had been a complete bastard – of that much, he was somehow sure…

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The tarot/divination cards used in this galaxy have a much larger Major Arcana (33 cards) than the tarot decks traditionally used on our Earth (22). Some of the symbiology is the same, with similar meanings. Other symbols that we might recognize (such as the Wheel of Fortune or Chance) have variant meanings as well in Sith lore.  
> 2\. The Only Two Rule of the Sith Tradition has been maintained by Plagueis and Palpatine, unlike in the Star Wars EU and animated series -- hence part of why seeking to Turn Luke to Darkness is such a momentous decision.  
> 3\. Maul, Plagueis, and Padme are remembered throughout this story, but their histories do not conform to any official SW storylines except those possibly extrapolated from the films alone. Palpatine's teacher, for instance, was human in my mind long before the EU gave him his own novel and made him a Muun.


	4. In the Gardens (new material added)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Increasingly disturbed by the escalating war with the Rebellion and Vader's obsessive search for Luke Skywalker, both the Emperor Palpatine and Military Intelligence Commander Treylan Jenrelm seek different kinds of solace in the Palace gardens. Edited to include a final scene at the end with Palpatine brooding about Luke and Vader.

**[Five weeks before Bespin]**

It was the last gasp of summer in the midst of early autumn. Night-blooming blossoms exuded their special musky and spicy fragrances – expressly mingled by the gardeners who bred and planned them thus. Moonflowers from a dozen different worlds bloomed in the night, first moon’s light gilding their proudly flaunted pale frocks of white, ivory, silver, and gold.

 

The combined aromas were intoxicating by design. And they were heightened tonight by the sweet illicit smoke of spiced herbs and tobacco that drifted across the breeze to the galactic monarch.  Someone was here at this insomniac hour. For a moment, in fact, time felt generally out of joint. Palpatine suddenly vividly recalled the days and evenings when, not that long ago, numerous visiting senators and diplomatic dignitaries strolled these garden paths – frequently stealing away from official functions for a cigar or pipeful or two, or even perhaps a hit of something stronger. Some aspiring personages even brought their children, many of whom hoped to make good impressions at Court at a very young age, their combined innocence and ambition a piquant psychic bouquet more ravishing than these mingling perfumes…

 

But that was years distant now. Palpatine chuckled low in his throat and at his own expense. It was bad enough to introduce one’s children to a galactic tyrant: to expose them to a seemingly benign former Chancellor, once the democratically elected symbol of the (doomed) Republic. But now it was hardly surprising that the well-groomed offspring of the aristocracy and High Command so rarely graced his Palace corridors and guest quarters, even during Ascension Week and the celebration of the Imperial New Year. It was little wonder that they almost never walked and played in these gardens anymore.

 

Not when he now far more resembled the crones of the old folktales – the evil sorcerers of the caves, or the ravenous witches who dwelt in the woods – biding his time in malign solitude, hoping to lure in children with enchanted familiar creatures gamboling just ahead on the paths. Or baiting delectable younglings with houses made of pastry and candy…

 

Ah, if only promises of wealth and comfort could draw in the Skywalker boy! If only the promises of eternally intoxicating (demanding, draining) Dark love and dynastic power were the sweets that might lure the boy to them… But, reared in desert peasant life and then educated, however briefly, in austere Jedi ways, Luke Skywalker had thus far resisted the worldly temptations the ruler and his Dark Lord could offer, to say nothing of the otherworldly allurements they were rumored to possess.

 

Suddenly the images rose up from his subconscious to invade his conscious mind: Would Luke arrive here tawny, leonine, tanned like Anakin had often been, his blond hair bleached golden by the suns? It made Palpatine’s mouth go dry. It made him hate their planned triad more than ever.

 

_I cannot do this_ , he thought for the hundredth or so time. Something close to panic rose in his breast, threatened to close his throat. He shoved it down ruthlessly and focused on his many reasons for annoyance instead.

However excessive and ridiculously expensive, the probe droids had not tracked down Skywalker a second time. Not since Hoth. Vader’s increasingly violent and desperate efforts had seemingly availed them naught.  Vader was onplanet tonight, in fact; he had briefly checked in with Palpatine upon his arrival at his estate on the other side of the city and had not even set foot in the Palace this trip. Torn between relief, resignation, and resentment, the ruler had been unable to sleep all night.

 

Yet Vader’s man Treylan Jenrelm was here. Palpatine now recognized the man’s Force signature, wafting toward him like the perfume of his spiced cigar or cigarette. Director Jon Kalendra, the man’s companion, was not out here with him – a simple fact that seemed to confirm the Emperor’s impression that their partnership was in a troubled or even perhaps a terminal phase…

 

And Force knew Palpatine should recognize that phenomenon, too, when he encountered it in others… But the facts of his own strained, possibly failing, partnership were hardly worth pondering at the moment. Not if he still held out faint hope of getting a couple hours of sleep before dawn.

 

Jenrelm himself now appeared in a pathway that opened out of a copse of enormous, ancient trees – a notorious trysting-spot for the last several centuries. Indeed, the officer’s tunic and blond hair were slightly and uncharacteristically rumpled. The additional presence or presences – lover or lovers – Palpatine idly searched for had, apparently, already departed the gardens. For a moment the monarch was virtually blinded by irrational anger, somehow, on Kalendra’s behalf, although he rarely contemplated the man on any existential level, beyond the performance of his official intelligence duties. Inexplicably, Palpatine silently raged at inconstancy, and the capricious nature of humanity. Hells, of the universe.

 

He suddenly fiercely resented the loss of his own youth and stamina, and of whatever vanished handsomeness, which he had so little valued beyond its political utility, he had once possessed. Then arose his old, choking, irrational fury at the abrupt and nearly fatal end of Vader’s legendary beauty – that golden primal advantage that Luke Skywalker now so horrifyingly possessed.

 

It should all mean nothing. To a sorcerer consumed by weighty mysteries of life and death, to a galactic ruler absorbed in matters of authority and sovereignty, war and peace, such matters should be irrelevant. To a Sith master for whom the Tradition and its continuance should be of the utmost concern, such mere aesthetic and emotional questions should carry absolutely no weight. Palpatine breathed deeply, re-centering himself and banishing the intrusive thoughts as best he could.

 

The Emperor watched Jenrelm smoke broodingly, the officer inhaling and exhaling loudly as he retraced the pathway back toward his rooms in the Palace. Force-blind, he did not notice Palpatine at first. The older man gathered the shadows more closely around himself and remained utterly silent, standing now before him in the winding walkway and smiling in slight malice as the MI commander heedlessly approached.

 

Merely a few meters in front of Palpatine, the officer threw the butt-end of his cigarette to the grass. He viciously ground it into the dirt with a booted heel, murmuring epithets to himself and radiating a sort of tired, bitter anger of his own.

 

“Commander,” the Sith lord spoke into the nocturnal stillness, which was marred only slightly by easily ignored ambient urban noise. “My groundskeepers have enough to do without your adding to their chores.” Even the chirping, humming night insects around them had fallen silent at Palpatine’s presence.

 

Jenrelm startled violently. “Your Majesty!” he exclaimed after a short pause, gathering himself to make sense of the black apparition before him. He sank to his knees right on the graveled path, and the Emperor found his cold anger slightly assuaged.

 

Palpatine relented a bit, putting back his velvet hood so the moonlight could reflect upon his withered but familiar countenance, rendering him far less eerie, if more ordinarily frightful. But Jenrelm was accustomed to his wasted pale features, and did not outwardly react. He remained quite correctly on the ground until the older man gestured for him to rise.

 

“Sire,” the officer said when he stood erect and tall by Palpatine’s side. “Were you…looking for me?” he asked, utterly sincere and somehow almost innocent. Now the moonlight revealed a faint smear of lipstick down Jenrelm’s throat. Oh, definitely not Kalendra, then, as Palpatine had already surmised. At least his Force senses remained strong as ever even as his body increasingly betrayed him…

 

Palpatine found himself amused by Jenrelm’s unconscious egotism when he knew he should be slightly affronted. It reminded him, suddenly, of Anakin. Of Vader.  Maybe even of the Jedi boy Vader now hunted so assiduously, so desperately, throughout the vast widths and breadths of the expanding galaxy.

 

“And now I have found you,” the monarch magnanimously replied, letting Jenrelm wonder whatever he would. He shifted his cane in his hands and looked pointedly at the younger man, who astutely, gallantly crooked an elbow and offered it for the ruler to take. “While you walk with me back to the Palace, I wish you to give me your impressions of Lord Vader’s search for Luke Skywalker.”

 

 

At the ornate entrance to Palpatine’s suite, Trey bowed low to the Emperor. “Good night, Sire.” A moment later the older man glided through the veranda doors and they closed silently behind him.

 

Swallowing against his lingering nervousness, the intelligence officer turned back onto the pathway and deliberately retraced his steps. It took a few minutes, given the limited moonlight and the deep shadows  cast by statuary, trees, and shrubbery – shadows that seemed only somewhat natural here at night – to find the spent cigarette stub Palpatine had seen him discard. Then he searched for the other butt end he’d tossed to the ground an hour or so ago, when he’d rendezvoused with that pretty auburn-haired art historian who had recently joined the stable of Palace docents.

 

She was intelligent and interesting enough, he supposed – and sufficiently adventurous to join him in the lovely eerie copse of trees that had sheltered so many groups of lovers throughout the centuries. Yet even as her scent lingered on his skin, Jenrelm already had trouble remembering her face…. Instead he was discomfited – and angry at his reaction – by his lingering sense of guilt over Jon.

 

Jon, to whom Trey had managed to be faithful for more than five years – but who deserved better than the last year of their relationship, when Jenrelm had taken more lovers than Jon even suspected. Trey no longer tried to explain what Kalendra probably could never understand: that as the war with the Rebellion escalated and tensions between Vader and Palpatine skyrocketed, Trey found it increasingly difficult to relax or to rest, in Jon’s company or anyplace else. After the destruction of the Death Star and the time Lord Vader had discovered he had a son, in fact, the bottom had fallen out of Treylan’s world. 

 

The climates aboard _Executor_ and in this palace had shifted and darkened practically overnight. After Alderaan and the Death Star, Vader’s legendary impatience with bureaucracy, error, and incompetence had morphed into constant irritability and occasionally murderous retribution. More than once Treylan had overheard good patriotic officers, beings who had spent years seeking positions on _Executor_ , ruing their decisions and discussing their transfer applications. More seriously, the unique camaraderie that united _Executor_ ’s officers and crew – the special, passionate rock-solid loyalty many of them felt for the Dark Lord despite Vader’s dread reputation and exacting expectations – was starting to falter and unravel….

 

Jenrelm had cautiously – so cautiously! – discussed the matter with his commander, and Vader had assured him that once Skywalker was found, the urgency and sense of crisis would ease. He would no longer need to demand such near perfection from the men of his flagship and the rest of her fleet…

And gods knew nobody missed Admiral Ozzel, and Piett was rising to the occasion quite nicely. But Agurien, Liete, and even Demossi's losses had been mostly unexpected and definitely alarming, and were still keenly felt among many in the fleet and High Command.

 

Trey wished he could find relief in Vader's assurance. But everything still felt poised on the precipice.

 

Hence Jenrelm, driven once again by his old destructive need to find distraction in the eyes and arms of multiple lovers, had to be careful lest he fall off that edge. First there was his family, who never accepted or approved of anything he did. And then there was Jon, whom he’d never wanted to alienate or injure, but who had grown to know him all too well….the ironic price of emotional intimacy.

 

And of course there was Vader, the being Trey admired most in the galaxy, and whom he even genuinely liked much of the time – or at least whom he had liked a great deal until recent months… Vader, whose approval and admiration could sometimes sustain Jenrelm when everything else felt bleak. Yet that validation was in short supply for nearly everyone these days, it seemed.

 

All that was bad enough. But even worse, Trey could do nothing to really help the Dark Lord; he was too well known, his face too familiar in the Imperial hierarchy, to go undercover again and assist the Empire directly against the Rebellion. He was too utterly ungifted in the Force to fully comprehend, much less repair, the yawning morass of alienation, ambition, deceit, and betrayal that separated the two Sith. He was too damned cautious and dutiful to advise either of them about the other – too formal and, shamefully, too gods-damned _afraid_ – to dare share the insights he had gained over the years while fulfilling his various MI responsibilities in the Palace and _Executor_.

 

He felt useless, irrelevant, much of the time. It was no wonder he sought solace with virtual strangers who had no reason to judge him – at least not until they’d spent the night with him once!  He chuckled bitterly.

 

And of all the times to have attracted Palpatine’s critical notice! Sometimes he genuinely wondered whether he’d been born under a set of malign constellations, as his father always maintained. Finally locating the second cigarette butt, Jenrelm sighed wearily, picked it up, and sank onto the nearest garden bench. He glared angrily into the copse of trees, irritated that a few birds were already beginning to chirp out their first tentative notes of the predawn early morning.

 

Trey dug in his tunic until he found his lighter and cigarettes. He hoped fervently that the few grains of spice scattered amongst the tobacco might relax him enough that he could grab several hours of sleep before going on duty.

 

Inhaling the warm fumes and mild stimulants deeply into his lungs, Jenrelm carefully placed the two extinguished butt-ends in his silver pocket case. Gods forbid that the garden staff really did look askance at the litter and say something to the Emperor (Why the hells would they, over such a petty concern? Really though, it wasn’t worth the risk). Or worse, and far more likely, that Palpatine himself might wander back out here for some reason and see the annoying evidence of Jenrelm’s defiance…

 

_“While you walk with me back to the Palace,”_ Palpatine had instructed, _“I wish you to give me your impressions of Lord Vader’s search for Luke Skywalker.”_

After a moment of silence in which he’d no doubt gaped like a stupid schoolboy (while already feeling like one after the sovereign’s quiet reprimand), Jenrelm had finally recovered some measure of his customary tact and charm. “Of course, Your Majesty,” he’d answered with a gracious confidence he hardly felt. “It would be my pleasure.”

 

Trey groaned softly, exhaling smoke into the chill dawning air. He barely remembered what polite generalities he’d offered the ruler, save that he’d praised _Executor_ ’s nonexistent morale and expressed confidence that the Dark Lord would soon succeed in finding Skywalker and crushing the Alliance. Jenrelm had deferentially refused to think about how appallingly old Palpatine looked and sounded. Yet in tacit recognition of the sovereign’s growing debility he had made sure they did not walk too quickly (or, for that matter, too condescendingly slowly) toward the royal suite.

 

Above all, Trey had forbidden himself to register the crawling eeriness he’d felt as he held the skeletal arm of the most dangerous man in the galaxy and walked with him through thick ominous shadows that somehow gathered and undulated around them, just at the edges of Treylan’s peripheral vision.

 

_What the hells was all of that? I might have to ask Vader about it one day_…

 

Right now he was not ready to tell the Dark Lord about any of it – not even the vague and loyal assurances he’d given Palpatine about Vader’s recent behavior. Jenrelm was completely reluctant to inform his commander about why Palpatine had found him in the gardens at this indecent hour – much less how he’d attracted the ruler’s notice in the first place. He wanted never to admit to babbling meaninglessly about Vader and Skywalker while escorting an ancient and inexplicably terrifying Palpatine back to his private quarters.

 

_Maybe I will ask him later, when everything is calmer again._

 

If that day ever came. Truly, Trey had his serious doubts.

 

Shivering in the early morning light, he carefully extinguished his last cigarette. Meticulously placing its crushed remains in his silver case, Jenrelm rose from the bench and meandered down the gravel path toward the entryway that led to his guest quarters.

 

 

 

 

 

Dawn found the Emperor re-watching the recording of Luke Skywalker as he first appeared in their lives: staging an against-all-odds storming of the Death Star prison block, freeing the battle station’s invaluable (and, against even greater odds, its last) Alliance political prisoner. As much as it galled Palpatine to know that little Leia Organa was once more out in the galaxy working mayhem on his projects and plans, the object of his horrified fascination, as always these last two years, was Vader’s plucky gallant son.

 

_“I’m Luke Skywalker; I’m here to rescue you.”_

Certain questions had haunted Palpatine these more than twenty-two standard months: Did Vader think that Luke might somehow “rescue” the Dark Lord from his life of isolation and bitter disappointment? And what would it mean for the ruler if the boy somehow managed to do that? Did Palpatine believe that young Skywalker was even capable of “saving” Vader, or of healing Palpatine? Of rescuing anyone?

 

What did any of it mean, to any of them?

 

Did Luke know even the smallest bit about his parentage? Did he think his duty was to save his father from the clutches of Vader’s Dark master – not realizing or caring about the entwined emotional reality the Sith shared, and which Luke’s passionless Jedi teachers could not, dared not, imagine or recognize?

 

Vader had saved Palpatine more than once, too – and still could, perhaps. Certainly the Dark Lord’s existence drove the Emperor to endure through old age and rapidly growing debility, to spare his student the necessity of ruling everything alone. Both Sith were obviously desperate to salvage the remnants of their dyad. Vader still quite deliberately displayed moments of gentleness with his master. Palpatine sometimes nearly trusted his apprentice, and more frequently struggled to behave as if he did. Both teacher and pupil clearly required and appreciated these performances, even if they found those emotions increasingly difficult to actually summon or sustain.

 

But Luke, educated not even in the cautious pedagogical variety of the old Jedi Academy, but solely (as far as they knew) by the rigid humorless Kenobi, doubtlessly believed that his father was a sort of slave, a captive under an evil influence, just waiting for his true Light Side self to be released… Clinging to such oversimplified, juvenile interpretations was how the Jedi had always evaded awareness of their own agency – their own responsibility for driving their most ambitious, imaginative, precocious, and passionate students into Darkness…

 

The Knights had no middle ground, after all: Anakin Skywalker was a helpless victim in need of saving, or else the monster Darth Vader must be eradicated.

 

And Palpatine would destroy Luke first, should the boy insist upon either of those imperatives…

 

_I need him as much as you do_ , the Emperor thought furiously at the young man he had yet to meet, pushing away his wish and his contradictory dread that perhaps he never would encounter Luke until it was too late. _In fact, I need Vader more than you do. You have never even known him…._ The boy had friends, after all (including Leia Organa herself), and acquaintances, and comrades in arms…

  
Yet the galactic sovereign only had Vader.

 

The Dark Lord already had rescued Palpatine more than he realized, just by giving the elder Sith hope and meaning again in his bleakest period after Maul’s death. In those grimmest years, the desire for revenge on Kenobi, by stealing his apprentice and making Anakin into Palpatine’s Chosen One instead, had given Palpatine enormous motivation and distracted him from his melancholy. And somehow, on the random nihilistic nights in which memories of Plagueis were most vivid, recalling his times with Vader sometimes managed to ward off the black void that threatened to swallow Palpatine’s heart and spirit…

 

At certain critical moments even now, despite the chasm in their dyad, Vader was still his champion. The fierce, unknowing vindicator of Palpatine’s difficult past : gallant avenger of the pain that the Dark Lord occasionally sensed but did not directly inquire about or intrude upon.

 

No. Palpatine could not have endured losing Vader to the Jedi then. And he dared not risk relinquishing him to Luke Skywalker now….

 

Commander Jenrelm had given Palpatine no new insights into Vader’s plan for his son. The officer was too well-disciplined to be as indiscreet as the Emperor had hoped. No matter; Palpatine had nevertheless sensed Jenrelm’s lurking disquietude when Skywalker was discussed even briefly. The ruler relished the MI commander’s keen resentment and noticed an edge of full-blown jealousy – emotions surprisingly yet gratifyingly akin to the ruler’s occasional sentiments about Vader’s ill-begotten offspring.

 

_Jenrelm bears closer watching_ , he mused. _Vader trusts him, even likes him…and quite probably has no inkling how truly deeply and thoroughly Jenrelm hates his son…_

 

Palpatine sighed wearily as he flicked a control, and the image of Luke Skywalker froze on the screen in golden, youthful, nearly poreless closeup perfection. Allowing himself only a few seconds to reinforce his treacherous and nearly involuntary memorization of Luke Skywalker’s face, the ruler finally shut off his viewer and limped off to bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I have revised this chapter with an additional scene at the end.  
> 2\. I hate "death sticks" and see it as a derogatory nickname that most smokers would not routinely use.  
> 3\. Treylan knows he has an addictive personality -- but is not fully aware of how strongly it influences him. Because he is estranged from his family, and also his life partner, and, now to a degree even from his hero and immediate superior Lord Darth Vader, Jenrelm is ever more at loose ends, seeking comfort in questionable ways.  
> 4\. He and Palpatine have more in common these days than anyone realizes.


	5. Traversing the Astral Planes (revised)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Lord Vader physically searches for his son throughout the galaxy, Palpatine does the same through the Force, undertaking a potentially dangerous astral travel search for the third member of their proposed trinity of Darkness.

**Chapter 5 [Four weeks before Bespin]**

 

On a rare night in which his slowly failing body had relatively little pain, Palpatine had successfully meditated for several hours. After a long period of deep breathing, he lay drained but relaxed on his parlor couch in the last few hours before dawn when no one would interrupt him. The room was cool and dim and silent around him, and he had managed to ease most of the distracting tension from his muscles (no small feat in itself, in these trying days after Alderaan and Etren). Furthermore, the small amount of glitterstim he’d imbibed would facilitate his psychic explorations.

 

Yet the Emperor hesitated before he began his astral journey. It had been decades since he’d last done this – many years since he had needed to let his soul travel the universe while tethered to his body by only the slenderest of psychic cords. Such travels always involved some risk, no matter what Light-Side adepts liked to claim; more than one Sith text, in fact, warned of the beings on the astral and nether planes who wanted nothing more than to trap souls on those levels of existence while their bodies slowly withered and died, untended, in the physical world…

 

Palpatine had never had time or inclination to become so enamored. He did not find the varied (and sometimes deadly) beings who dwelt on these alternate planes, and who might be prone to sharing their own supposed truths and experiences, to be particularly wise or instructive. Not enough, once he encountered them, to encourage them to weave glamours that might make him tarry too long, in deadly detachment from his physical form.

 

Indeed, the entities the ruler had encountered over the decades – fragmented shades of psychic explorers and a few integrated personalities of deceased adepts – rarely seemed to know anything Palpatine had not already learned, or which he could not have eventually ascertained on his own. Then there were the human, alien, bestial, and completely supernatural guardians who sought to deter seekers from gaining the wisdom allegedly offered in these otherworlds. When their psychic attacks were violent enough, they could and sometimes did kill seekers’ bodies even on the material planes.

 

Despite his resolve, Palpatine hesitated a few moments from the sheer weightiness of it all. His current quest was no trivial or routine matter, for he would be tracking Vader’s son. Until Luke was theirs, it seemed absolutely imperative that Palpatine extend his lifespan, learn Plagueis’ secrets, and protect his and Vader’s legacy. After so much sacrifice to create the Empire, the Sith deserved to see it stabilize and succeed, the damned Rebellion gone, the last Jedi eliminated or Turned. Could it be that the vision he served, the ultimate restoration of his Tradition’s galactic supremacy, would not be fulfilled in one or even two lifetimes? Death was a grim enough prospect under any circumstances – but to perish without knowing his legacy was secure?

 

Unacceptable.

 

_He will join us or die, my master…_

 

The Dark Lord was doing his part, ruthlessly searching the remote corners of the galaxy. And now Palpatine would do the same – but without stepping foot outside the Palace.

 

According to ancient Sith texts and Palpatine’s own experience, mortals who openly pursued the secrets to eternal life were unfailingly tempting and constant targets – as if entities of the astral and nether planes, themselves dead or having never physically lived, considered this audacious quest outrageous and forbidden. His own master had nearly died once, before Palpatine was even born, in such searching. A ferocious, offended etheric sentry – much like those half-corporeal fanged beasts who guarded and trapped the dead Sith on Korriban – had nearly severed Plagueis’ psychic connection to his physical form; Palpatine’s teacher had almost become a trapped vengeful soul wandering the netherworlds for eternity.

 

The galactic sovereign did not let himself ponder certain disturbing questions. Would Palpatine have been better off (selfishly, on an individual level no good Sith should contemplate) in the long run, had Plagueis suffered such a paranormal fate, never to abduct, train and torment his apprentice – although it would have meant the end, or a centuries-long setback, for the Tradition? Did Plagueis, his broken disintegrating skeleton brooding in the onyx tomb created nearly ten generations ago by his master’s master’s master, now wish he had remained on the alternate planes after all, thus avoiding his violent murder and subsequent entrapment on Korriban at the hands of his own vengeful student?

 

Would Palpatine, years or perhaps mere weeks from now, soon find himself confined to the exact same dynastic mausoleum, at the mercy of his late master once more, instead of the quiet pastoral final resting place Vader had promised, far from Coruscant but nowhere near Korriban? Or would the Dark Lord decide to betray that vow, made under duress when they were both slowly dying on Etren?

 

Certain things did not bear thinking about... Instead, half in trance, the sovereign lifted the enemy artifact he’d extracted from storage, caressing its cold metallic handle, deliberately seeking out its remnant Force-signature.

 

Ignoring his instinctive desire to hurl the weapon far from him, Palpatine opened himself up to the faint psychic tendrils that emanated from Kenobi’s lightsaber. Vader had sent it, and the late Jedi’s empty dusty robes, to Coruscant hours after cutting down his old teacher on the Death Star. Vader had included a short note, and Palpatine vividly remembered the complex emotions – triumph, exhilaration, and a dark reluctant half-nostalgia – radiating from the formal realpaper and ink that bore Vader’s bold elegant handwriting. Kenobi’s things had almost no aesthetic appeal compared to the exquisite and priceless works of art and literature Vader had for decades delivered to his master from various corners of the galaxy. Yet as trophies of war and perhaps his final souvenirs from the Purge, the Emperor cherished them dearly.

 

Darkness rose within him along with his ancient anger at Kenobi. It lifted some of his dragging fatigue (which no meditation or discipline could banish these days) as he settled more deeply into a guided meditative state. Palpatine caressed his hands around and over the enemy lightsaber, coaxing forth emotions and imagery, welcoming the weapon’s indignation at the ruler’s temerity and its growing sense of violation. Palpatine had always had talent for this sort of thing, but his physical decline seemed to heighten his psychic potency as he inched closer to the boundary between the carnal and discarnate, the edges of mortal time and eternity – another development whose implications he chose not to ponder too closely… Shunning that train of thought, the Sith closed his eyes, raised his shields against other distractions, and sank into a focused psychometric near-trance…

 

He waited through the characteristic faint vibrations that spread throughout his body and mind – the initial warning signs that his etheric form was about to separate and float free. This moment was when many astral seekers rebelled against their missions, instinctively fearing the separation, only to slam fully back into their physical forms. But Palpatine persisted, ignoring the seemingly tenuous slender glowing ebon cord that bound him to his aged body… and instead walking down the mist-shrouded corridor in his mind’s eye….

 

The first images that rose to greet him were vague and foggy, like old holographs faded across the decades. Trailing Kenobi through Force and time, imagining the dead Jedi’s lingering essence as a trail of clues leading the Emperor closer to Skywalker, Palpatine found that it was so. His metaphor held, as the lightsaber obeyed his psychic directives:

 

First he witnessed early interactions between an adolescent Obi-Wan and his teacher Qui-Gon Jinn, watching Kenobi’s master’s face and listening to his instructions from Kenobi’s point of view, even as the ruler somehow also watched their tableau from the shadows in third-person omniscient perspective. He gazed on and within Kenobi in slight involuntary interest for a few moments as the two Light-Siders discussed philosophy and sparred together. Then, for only a few seconds, Jinn turned and stared into the shadows where Palpatine lurked, as if the older Jedi were sentiently aware on this plane of existence and not merely a memory-recording offered up by the talismanic lightsaber…

 

But then the moment faded, and Palpatine was watching Kenobi’s memories again, mostly filtered from Kenobi’s point of view. Briefly he wondered if, decades ago, one of them might have been able to briefly sense his watching them, although he had not truly borne sorcerous witness until this very moment…

 

The lightsaber continued to provide him scattered imagery of tutelage and affection; of conversations for which Palpatine had almost no use; and of rare battle scenes before the Clone Wars. Palpatine watched the psychometric tableaus before him, then urged the weapon to take him more deeply into the relevant, more recent past.

 

The astral “ground” felt spongy and treacherous under his phantom booted feet, as Palpatine – his psychic persona far stronger than his debilitated physical form – unwaveringly and methodically traversed the streets of emotions and reminiscence, relentlessly exploring trajectories of Kenobi’s lifepath. Sometimes he reached metaphoric dead ends of nostalgia, turning away from more memories of Kenobi’s dyad with Jinn, and the cul-de-sacs of endless Jedi training sessions…

 

He pushed forward gently yet relentlessly, working his formidable will to fold and shift and hasten the passage of time, seeking a more solid, recent connection between the lightsaber and the man with whom it wished to reunite even though Kenobi now resided on the other side of the Veil…

 

Before beginning this exercise, Palpatine had steeled himself against certain moments he had anticipated and to which he could not permit himself any distracting emotional response. Thus it was with relative impassivity that he observed fragments of Kenobi’s training sessions with young Anakin Skywalker, their interactions growing more subtly tense and troubled as Anakin grew to full manhood. The ruler now witnessed his own influence at work in his future apprentice, marveling again how the Jedi had not recognized its truest nature. As Kenobi and his pupil conversed, trained, and risked their lives in missions together, Anakin’s psyche increasingly reflected some of Palpatine’s essence as well, ribbons of glowing Darkness and ambition threading through the young man’s aura.

 

Despite his own desire to bask in the glory of his Dark Lord’s maturation and Turning, the Emperor knew the longer he tarried, the more he risked the failure of his enterprise. He hurried time along, urging the weapon he held to move forward, to seek out and show him its owner’s last years in exile on Tatooine or wherever the hells Kenobi had been all this time between the Purge and his demise on the Death Star. Hours perhaps passed this way, or maybe only mere minutes. But then something in the astralscape shifted, the “air” growing more weighty and ponderous. Perhaps powerful entities had finally taken notice of Palpatine’s presence, or belatedly deigned to plumb the depths of his ruthless intentions…

 

Then suddenly, everything somehow shifted, and he found himself standing in the middle of the Jedi Temple, seemingly no longer a mere observer.

 

He stood in the enormous main hall, feeling the plush carpeting beneath his boots and staring at the vast columns and arched ceilings. Priceless artwork, including a few pieces that now graced the guest wing of his Palace, hung on the ten-meter-high walls. He studied everything with mild curiosity, raising his shields against the ghostly remnant-Light that clung to this unreal-real place on the astral planes.

 

He had never been here when it existed in physical reality the way it appeared to him now – before its near-destruction after Vader’s conversion and the Purge. He had never been invited to this place, even though as Chancellor he’d been afflicted with a series of official Knightly liaisons and Jedi advisors attempting to exhort and steer him at every turn. He’d been in their company and at the receiving end of their counsel and sermonizing, their interference and obstructionism, for decades. He had fought hard in the Senate for their generous funding (albeit for his own purposes and until they had needed it the most). He had sent them into increasingly deadly battles across the galaxy. He had pulled their collective and individual hides out of the fire on more than one occasion – particularly when his future apprentice was in considerable danger.

 

Despite all this, the Knights had never seen fit to have him here as an official guest “honored” by their wholesome simple repasts – somehow sensing, deploring, yet never comprehending Palpatine’s truest nature. Countless other Chancellors had dined here over the centuries; Finis Valorum had been feted here on at least a dozen occasions that Palpatine knew of – even as a senator forced from his Chancellorship and about to retire in the shadow of rumored corruption and scandal….

 

The Emperor slowly turned, his ornate velvet astral cloak swirling around his ankles, gazing with a rather disconcerting half-resentment and half-curiosity at the memory-wisps and residual energies that manifested in dim stone alcoves scattered around the perimeter of the vast room. Vague whispering voices murmured things just past the edge of his ability to hear. Apprehension raised bumps across his arms and stirred the fine hairs at his nape when shadows moved in his peripheral vision. Dead Jedi began to converge upon him now, yet none were the man he had come here to confront.

 

Palpatine altered his mood, projecting Dark challenge and determination. The apparitions – some of whom he recognized – slowed their approach and hung back, observing. Not certain which entity or forces had decided to manifest him in the Temple or why, and unsure whether he was in peril, he gathered threads of memory and time and tentatively tugged them in the direction of the future and his present-day self. When nothing attacked or otherwise interfered, the ruler carefully wound the gossamer skeins until sensations and images accelerated. Shadows undulated near his young, strong astral form, murmuring and moving too quickly to apprehend. Palpatine watched the Temple begin to crumble, walls and columns deteriorating and toppling around him as he expedited the echoes of past events and doomed enemies.

 

The lightsaber tingled in his hands, again resisting his thoughts and essence, struggling to resist his renewed directives. Palpatine glanced down at it for a moment – a mistake, perhaps.

 

When the ruler’s lashes – long and dark, as they had not been in years – swept upward again, Bail Organa stood only a meter away. The astral surface supporting them was marble; soaring windows and breathtaking mountainous vistas were their backdrop.

 

In contrast to the Temple, Palpatine _had_ been invited _here_ , on a few occasions – and _here_ was another place that no longer existed. More impressive, this _planet_ no longer existed, yet here they apparently stood.

 

He distantly wondered if he should worry about this development, and decided not to. It would do him no good, when his Force-senses needed to be at their sharpest, his Discernment and Persuasion turned to full capacity.

 

As if reading the older man’s concerns, Organa suddenly held forth a crystal goblet of shining emerald wine. “Would you care for a drink, Your Majesty?” The fragrance of sweet fermented fruit wafted toward him, and the Emperor wanted it very much indeed. “As you know, the House of Organa has grown these for many centuries.”

 

On ranchlands that no longer existed, then stored in subterranean wine cellars obliterated months ago… Some scrap of ancient knowledge gleaned in childhood – whether from his master’s lessons, or old fables and folklore, he did not know – warned him. _Consume nothing in the kingdoms of the fae, the realms of the dead…_ )

 

Palpatine crossed his arms over his chest in refusal, his long embroidered astral sleeves sweeping the immaculate illusory floor. “You stole Anakin Skywalker’s child,” he accused, seeing no reason for the half-sham pleasantries and courteous pretense both politicians had routinely wielded with one another in the past. Not when so many lies had been exposed, and so many secrets revealed, over the last few years.

 

“Better that _you_ had done so?” Organa retorted, his dark eyes flashing for merely a moment but his voice still schooled to a magnanimous ruler’s mildness. The tone was meaningless, as Palpatine well knew. “You think it better for that infant, I suppose, to have been raised in Darkness and autocracy?”

 

“Spare me your hyperbole. I know it too well from our days in the Senate.” Long before the Empire, Organa and Palpatine had collaborated more often than their respective allies believed wise – and more secretively and productively than many beings, including the Jedi, had even realized.

 

“We did have some positive interactions, I admit. When left to our own devices, we frequently reached compromises beneficial to us both. At least in the early days.” Bail paused, and sipped from his own goblet, setting the other glass on a small ornate table that simply materialized into being. “So I think I know you, Chancellor. Rather better than many beings – perhaps better than most.”

 

Palpatine nearly snorted a note of quiet laughter. “ _Do_ you?”

 

“Indeed.”

 

“You and Kenobi abducted Skywalker’s son,” the Sith persisted, taking a half-menacing step toward his former colleague. Something flickered in Organa’s gaze, but too quickly for Palpatine to read. The ruler sighed inwardly with frustration. “Mothma too?” Palpatine intuited, hoping to throw the man off balance.

 

Bail suddenly seemed nearly serene, despite his confirmation:  “She advised against our plan, honestly.”

 

“ _Mothma_ alone saw reason? Of all of you in this vast conspiracy, only _she_ , who dared move openly against us when the rest of you did not, acknowledged that Luke Skywalker _belongs to us_?” Fury, incredulity, and bitter irony warred in Palpatine’s breast.

 

“Oh, no, Chancellor. She wanted to kill the child.”

 

Although he was incorporeal and strong on the astral planes, the Emperor actually swayed in shock, the words landing on him in an unexpected brutal blow. Like poison to which he should have been immune, Organa’s simple statement made him reel in place for a few seconds. A deep armchair suddenly appeared behind him, touching the backs of his knees, tempting him to collapse into it.

 

Instead he stepped sideways, willing the chair’s banishment. On this fraught matter, Palpatine’s anger had always been for his and Vader’s sakes – fiery rage at how they had been deceived and thus humiliated, toxic fury for the Dark Lord’s new psychological and emotional injuries at Kenobi’s hands.

 

But _this_ …!

 

For the first time since they had learnt of Luke’s existence, Palpatine’s wrath was fully on the boy’s behalf. His own occasional murderous impulses toward Vader’s son seemed abruptly, even if temporarily, incomprehensible and irrelevant. What Palpatine and Vader decided to do with their only logical heir was their business and theirs alone. Luke’s life and destiny were not playthings for Outsiders’ plots and aggrandizement; the child should be no mere pawn in this endless war between Sith and Jedi.

 

Palpatine tried to regather his focus and calm. “I have come for Kenobi, whether to confront his coherent personality or even his dis-integrated shade. This is between him and me. Step aside, Senator.”

 

Bail moved forward, close enough that Palpatine could smell the wine on his breath, as well as the man’s trademark designer cologne. Organa’s dark eyes riveted on his own, carrying an undeniable hypnotic allure Palpatine had never noticed while the man was alive. “Stay here, Chancellor. Let us reminisce some more – or perhaps bargain with each other as we once did.”

 

Involuntary fascination and a strange, contradictory nostalgia began to rise in the midst of Palpatine’s righteous indignation and horror – possibly some weak, tainted part of him longing for simpler and perhaps happier times, many years ago. Before there was a Throne, or a tiny boy, for the seizing…

 

In his lingering dizzy anger – was he already wearing out, far away in space and time, lying on the couch in his private chambers? – the Sith lord’s heart thudded in his chest and his senses swam. Or maybe this was some Jedi-taught glamour Organa had learned in secret – another insidious, abruptly revealed Truth that had the power to harm Palpatine and perhaps his Dark apprentice as well.

 

“Step aside,” he repeated. “I _will_ know more about this plot. I _will_ confront Kenobi. It is long overdue.”

 

“ _I_ am not finished with you yet,” the Alderaani senator replied. A new bass warning note sounded in the back of his voice – one that Palpatine was sure he’d never heard from this man before.

 

Suddenly the Emperor knew he was likely in mortal danger. If Bail so obviously wanted to delay him here, in Organa’s own illusory territory… then to remain in this astral palace for another moment would be folly. With a harsh twist of Palpatine’s adamantine will, the scenery around them vanished….

 

Sighing inaudibly in relief, the ruler looked around at the elite Coruscanti restaurant he’d conjured on the astral planes, grateful at Organa’s expression of stunned dismay. Palpatine had not had time or strength to summon revelatory images of the Lars homestead on Tatooine, but this was the next best thing – a neutral meeting-place both senators had frequented in the past, and one distinctly close to the Emperor’s psychic and emotional home turf. He was farther away now from Kenobi, but one thing at a time…

 

Bail stared down at the elegant repast spread before them. “What, no ordering from the menu?”

  
Palpatine merely shrugged, catching his psychic breath, so to speak. Subtle food fragrances rose from the damask-clothed table. “Have whatever you like, Bail. Think it, and it may come true.”

 

Playing along for reasons the older man had yet to fathom, Organa lifted the lids of several steaming platters and tureens. “Do you plan to eat something?” the Alderaani asked, resuming his eerie scrutiny.

 

“I could if I wished. We are in _my_ astral jurisdiction now.”

 

“But you aren’t eating much these days, are you? If you were any other being, I’d accuse you of guilty conscience.” Bail chuckled lightly, scanning Palpatine’s features and perhaps, impossibly, his aura. “Perhaps you are lovesick for the first time in your life? But surely not for this young Jedi in training…”

 

Palpatine ground his teeth together but refused to rise to the bait.

 

Organa paused to pick up his napkin. “Hmm,” he elaborated contemplatively. “If I were still a wagering man, I’d bet you’re pining over your imminent demise.” His dark eyes gleamed with an impossible combination of mischief and empathy. “Really, take it from someone who knows these things now. It’s not as bad as it seems.”

 

“Please. You were never one to gamble much. You supported the Rebellion just enough to sustain it and arouse our suspicions – but not enough to seriously deplete your treasury or provide those traitors more than bare subsistence.”

 

“Never enough to give _you_ any solid proof, at least until the very end,” Bail mildly replied. “That’s the part that galls you most. In life, I had too much to lose. But now – now, when I can do practically _anything I wish_ , and my planet is no more…? _All bets are off_.”

 

Despite the younger politician’s placid tone, something sent a small shiver down Palpatine’s noncorporeal spine. “Since you seem to know everything about us these days,” he murmured sarcastically, “you know that Tarkin bears the ultimate responsibility for— “

 

“As if that cretin did _anything_ he thought might displease you! Not even Vader believes that.” The Alderaani unfolded the square of heavy fine linen and examined the fabric. “Beautiful; this is exactly like what this place had when we dined here years ago. My compliments.”

 

“Enough, Bail. Just what are you trying to do now, or to be? Some sort of spirit guide for _our_ child?”

 

“ _Trying_ has nothing to do with it.” Organa said quietly, arranging an assortment of exotic foods onto his gold-rimmed plate. Nausea the Emperor should not be able to feel twisted in his gut – an alarming echo of the chronic ailments that routinely plagued him. Palpatine averted his gaze to the candlelight and tried not to smell anything – not the food, the wine, or Organa’s familiar, sophisticated scent.

 

“Our little adventure today,” Bail continued, “in my palace and here in this fine establishment, will cost _you_ dearly when you return to mundane life. This astral quest has undoubtedly shaved some days off your remaining store. But it is only a _taste_ of the effortless, radical, and infinite freedom I now enjoy. The afterlife,” he added, “can be anything we wish it to be.”

 

“Really,” Organa concluded with a hint of acerbity, “you should experience it for yourself. _Soon_.”

 

Palpatine snorted and raised golden eyes to bore into Organa’s still-potent gaze. “There is no one on the afterplanes with whom I desire to tarry.” _Including you_ , he added silently, knowing he made his point without having to say the words aloud – yet also knowing, suddenly and with no small sense of alarm, that the sentiment was only mostly true.

 

Bail raised a finely manicured eyebrow. “Not even all your illustrious spiritual ancestors?”

 

The galactic sovereign winced inwardly. In a flash of character weakness, a goblet of red gleaming wine materialized in front of him. He studied it but did not drink.

 

The Ancestors be damned. But to be free of worry, exhaustion, and pain….?  Palpatine could not deny that the prospect had a shameful, unSithly appeal. Yet what in the _hells_ would he do with peace or eternity on his hands? The notion was incomprehensible to someone of his training and experience….

 

When Palpatine said nothing, his former colleague added, “Do you not miss your previous apprentice, whom you raised from childhood? Why not simply shed your vast discouragement and despair?”

 

Finally deciding he had nothing to prove by abstinence, the Sith reached for his own wineglass. These were _not_ the realms of the fae, even if this plane of existence technically bordered or belonged to some principality of the dead….

 

When the galactic sovereign glanced out the windows of this incorporeal restaurant, he willed himself to see the spires of his own palace gleaming in the distance. The sight helped stabilize him, as he had hoped. “So you know everything now?” Palpatine mocked. “Death has brought you omniscience? My gods, Bail,” he said exactly like the secular Outsider he had long pretended to be, “you’ve become even more intolerably self-righteous.”

 

“Not precisely omniscience.” Organa gave a quiet laugh and looked interestedly at a decadent dessert tray. “Just a new, deep awareness of what I decide to study closely. And I scrutinize _you_ a great deal now, Your Majesty. From afar, of course. As I never could before.”

 

Force, Palpatine was tired. “This is a pointless conversation.” He _would_ challenge Kenobi; he _would_ learn more about Luke Skywalker’s location and state of mind. He _would_ find the boy, fifty-six thousand probe droids notwithstanding…. In a few seconds, he’d drained the goblet and gestured for more. Some invisible functionary of these planes complied and a new wineglass appeared before him.

 

Again, Organa knew too much: “You are shockingly weary,” he observed while unseen diners murmured around them and invisible cutlery clinked softly against fine porcelain. “Worse than I’ve ever seen you. Why not just…stop? Rest, and give up your draining, vainglorious, futile ambitions of eternal life. It is forbidden knowledge. _No one_ can do it. You’re wasting your remaining days trying to achieve what _cannot_ be done.”

 

Palpatine refused to be diverted by this topic, and by this man who understood nothing of what they discussed. “Tell me about the child’s birth; the part in these plots played by his mother.” Palpatine leaned forward as if to see the truth of it displayed in the other man’s expression. Old-new rage (and perhaps an actual, mortal migraine he should not currently feel) threatened vertigo a second time. He was grateful for his astral realwood chair and the dim quiet of the illusory restaurant. “You owe us that much, damn you.”

 

“The only thing I _owe_ you is the larger truth I’m trying to make you see.”

 

“You are wasting my time. You are not _my_ spirit guide,” the ruler growled.

 

“But _I_ have all the time in the worlds now. You certainly cannot say the same.” Bail’s complex gaze held a sudden wounding near-sympathy.

 

Palpatine swallowed acid and turned the full power of his admittedly struggling psyche onto his mystical companion. “Why should you not tell me what I ask, let me find whom I traveled here to seek?” he demanded icily, ignoring how ill and aged he felt. “Why are you protecting that Jedi bastard even beyond the grave? Why does it matter when _all_ of you – Kenobi, Amidala, your _damned planet_ – are dead?!”

 

The Alderaani smiled in heartfelt, maddening compassion, as well as other emotions too complex and guarded to interpret. Selecting a dainty tart from the assortment that was blurring before Palpatine’s fading vision, Organa replied, “Because, my dear tyrant, it matters so very much to _you_.”

 

Suddenly too drained to sustain the gracious environment surrounding them, the Sith master simply abandoned the illusion. Dropping his half of the imaginative and psychic burden, so to speak, Palpatine felt Bail stagger under its astral weight while images and sounds and scents collapsed into chaos around them. Then, a moment later, everything smoothed out again into gray calm nothingness, as if they stood on an island encased in oceanic mist…

 

Struggling to adjust to their mutually unfamiliar surroundings, Bail could no longer shield against the older man (for Palpatine realized belatedly, with no small shock, that that was _exactly_ what Organa had been doing, as he never could in life). And the ruler abruptly caught a glimpse of a carefully guarded, barricaded… _something_... in Organa’s memory. Bail was more tired by this confrontation than he had anticipated, and rattled by the unnerving _reality_ of such exhaustion while free of any mortal shell. He’d become too absorbed in his new, heady, potentially risky connection with the Emperor. Somewhat lulled by Palpatine’s weariness and involuntarily charmed by their (by all rights impossible) half-nostalgic conversation, Organa was startled and disoriented by the abruptly vanishing restaurant-illusion.

 

In his fatigue and surprise, the late prince consort of the late Alderaan could only reel backward. Organa swore aloud, a completely vulgar phrase like nothing the Sith had ever heard him employ – dazed and fazed by the warning astral coldness he’d obviously never felt before, seeping into both politicians now that they were so discomposed – and dismayed by the images the Emperor too obviously glimpsed, for merely a few fleeting moments, from Organa’s mind:

 

_Luke!_

_Kenobi, in his own sort of glowing astral form, watching as the boy balanced rocks one atop the other in an elementary Force-lesson._ For a moment the vision-fragments halted and went black as Organa fought to restore his wearied mental barriers. Guarded secrets the Emperor could not yet grasp hold of whispered just beyond his range of psychic hearing for a moment before falling into maddening silence.

 

No matter that they were not really physical on this plane, Palpatine grabbed hold of Organa’s silk-clad shoulders and yanked his former Viceroy closer to him, staring into his psyche, pushing hard for the rest of the tell-tale imagery before the man’s rudimentary shields managed to snap upward again…

 

_Swampy ground, dripping dank foliage…_

_Luke, radiating Light, standing somehow at the center of everything… so dangerous, so earnest… so breathtakingly young…_

 

Frustrated, the ruler pressed harder, straining to see more even as the pain of Bail’s pushback reverberated through his brain. Palpatine would be practically dysfunctional after this, perhaps for days… But it did not matter. Even a glimpse of such treasure was worth everything, he mused, watching hungrily as the golden youth of Sithly nightmares and fantasies was ruthlessly put through his paces, growing stronger in mind and body… his raw inherited Talent gradually honed into a thing of undeniable deadly beauty…

 

Palpatine could see little else – no unique topography or vegetation – _Where in all the hells is this!?_

_Swamps, yes._ But this could be virtually any planet in his galaxy. Dread and disappointment threatened to eclipse his sense of victory as he watched a few stolen moments longer, resisting Organa’s efforts to cast him out of the vision…

 

The images were not detailed or numerous enough to be of great use. For a moment, his dearly won triumph seemed hardly worth the psychic and physical toll he would pay in hours or days to come.

 

But then suddenly, Force help them all, he also glimpsed _more than enough…!_

 

Horror, joy, hope, fatalism washed through and over the ruler, a tidal wave of emotions too primal and entwined for him to know what he should feel or do about any of it. Struggling to breathe in the backwash of ghastly, numinous revelation, he momentarily could not guard against his former colleague….

 

Organa shoved him hard, then, and he was _falling_ as if off a sheer obsidian cliff….

  
… _Down, down down down down—_

_—down—_

_—_ crashing into and almost out of his ancient body, latching frantically onto the shining ebon cord that tethered him to physical survival and material reality. He nearly dropped the lifeline in the vastness of his shock, and refused to ponder what that might have meant.

 

He lay on the couch for a long time, motionless except for the shuddering nauseated emotions that rippled through him in rhythmic and nearly convulsive succession. He’d tarried almost too long on the astral planes as he had known he should never do. Too connected to a being he’d never expected to encounter there, Palpatine had made a nigh-fatal novice’s mistake.

 

But even that humiliating, stunning fact was nothing next to the rest of it:

 

Mon Mothma had advocated Luke Skywalker’s murder.

 

Bail Organa was somehow becoming translated into a being of real, formidable abilites.

 

Worse, Obi-Wan Kenobi had not become an entity of the astral planes at all, it seemed… but was instead very much aware of, still interfering with and intensely invested in, Vader’s only son….

 

None of this boded well for Palpatine or his beloved-hated warlord….

 

But, worst of all was that _Yoda_ was still alive someplace in this galaxy. Already ancient when Palpatine had last seen him, the creature had somehow survived the Purge and his many years in exile.

 

And that green-skinned traitor, who never should have managed to live this long, was now training their heir to Darkness and the Throne….

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Right now this takes place four weeks before Vader confronts Luke at Cloud City. As the story gets longer and its chapters fit together more smoothly, the timeline may shift somewhat.
> 
> 2\. Vader will be so angry when Palpatine tells him about this adventure -- both from what he learns and also that Palpatine took these risks in the first place!
> 
> 3\. I revised this chapter over the weekend, after my muse kindly provided me more conversation between the Viceroy and the Emperor. In this chapter, I deliberately reference very little non-filmic/EU information on Bail Organa, as I have unwritten stories in which he has his own fraught complex past with Palpatine.
> 
> 4\. Enjoy! I love feedback, so tell me what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I prefer to give Palpatine no first name in most of my Politics of Empire (PoE) universe, and have never really fallen for "Sheev," although feel free to try to convince me.  
> 2\. The Etren crash landing cited throughout this story takes place 5-6 years prior to this story, in "Chains of Command," published years ago in the fanzine _I Don't Care What You Smell_. Message me if you're interested!  
> 3\. Other canon characters explored in the prequel films are occasionally referenced and remembered in this story; I use the prequels as a vast buffet from which I take some characters, relationships and ideas, and eschew others. The original trilogy films are my canon source material; the prequels are occasional canon; and the most recent film trilogy is irrelevant.  
> 4\. My concept of Darth Plagueis is mainly my own, not informed by other fanfic or official Lucasfilm/Disney writings on the character  
> 5\. This story is very long, and has many chapters that are coming together out of order. I may post this in installments here, or as separate short stories that are interconnected.


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